Saturday afternoon, Nick and I were feeling pretty bored. It was hot outside, and our usual industrious spirit (haha) had gone the way of the parachute pant. This is how we ended up anchored to the sofa for hours on end, watching John Carpenter's Body Bags on television.

We'd never heard of this movie, but how could we not give it a chance? After all, we're talking about John Carpenter, the man who brought us the Halloween films, Escape from L.A., Big Trouble in Little China, and—my personal favorite—They Live. This is a man with vision. True, it may be the sort of vision you'd have if you drank a bottle of Jagermeister and visited the Mutter Museum, but it's vision, nonetheless.

Body Bags is presented in a narrative format and features three horror vignettes. The first one includes Louis from Revenge of the Nerds (who is apparently the dad on Lizzie McGuire). The second one stars Mike Hammer (yes, I know that's not his real name). And the third one...well, the third one has Luke Skywalker. The narrator, a deathly pale coroner played by John Carpenter himself, introduces each segment with the kind of campy, comic enthusiasm that should be familiar to anyone who has ever watched Tales from the Crypt or any of those other late-night gems. Morbid puns abound.

The first segment was classic hitchhiker-brand horror stuff, depicting a young woman who runs the graveyard shift at a remote gas station. As she's showing up for work, she just happens to hear on her radio that there is a serial killer loose in the area. You don't say! Overall, this segment is so predictable you feel like you could almost quote the actors' lines along with them. But this familiarity got me thinking about why it is that certain horror devices work on our brains in the first place. After all, most horror films hash over the same-old storylines: haunted house, vampires/zombies, possessed dolls, teenagers out camping by the lake, etc. Every year, a deluge of horror films pours into the theaters fitting one of these existing formulas, and people flock to see them each time, even though they offer very little in the way of innovation or originality. You'd think people wouldn't be scared by this stuff anymore. But watching this tired old serial killer premise, I realized that these stories are using known techniques to grab at something primal in our brains. One of the most effective techniques a horror film can utilize is the creation of a safe place for the hero or heroine (in this case, it was the gas station booth), which is a fulcrum for the viewer's sensation of danger. It all seems rooted in the childlike need to have someplace that is protected, a home base that you can touch in order to be impervious to all harm. The brilliant thing about this is that by creating this one sanctuary where you believe with all your heart that no harm can come to the character, everything outside its perimeter seems that much more terrifying. We see the tiny gas station booth glowing like a beacon of safety in the midst of utter darkness—an architectural triumph of good over evil. And when our heroine is forced to leave her impenetrable fortress, as we know she will have to sooner or later, the viewer knows instinctively what's at stake. (I know it's weird that this is the kind of stuff I think about when watching horror films, but I can't seem to help it.)

The second segment of Body Bags was about Mike Hammer's thinning hair. This was by far the funniest segment of the three, and a good portion of it was spent just showing this character as he tries to camouflage his thinning locks using everything from comb-overs to spray-on hair. In desperation, he finally visits the office of a doctor who has been advertising a revolutionary method for permanently regrowing natural hair. (The doctor is the villain from Time Bandits, and in my experience, his presence in any film is shorthand for EVIL.) When Mike Hammer inquires about what is in the revolutionary new formula that will be applied to his follicles, he is told simply, "it's patented." Danger, Will Robinson! But Mike Hammer doesn't give this a second thought. He undergoes the procedure, and the next morning, he unwraps his bandages to find he has grown a mane of long, rock-star hair that reaches to his waist (the style he selected was called "the Stallion"). I won't give away what happens next, because you might want to see it for yourself. Haha, who am I kidding? None of you are ever going to watch this movie. So here's what happens. The new hair changes Mike Hammer's life, just as he hoped it would. But before long, it's growing abnormally quickly and sprouting from weird places, like his nose and inside his mouth. Also, the tips are twitching in an oddly lifelike way; when he trims his hair, he hears these weird little shrieks. Finally, he wakes one morning to discover hair growing all over his face, including on his forehead and under his eyes, and he storms into the doctor's office, demanding an explanation for what has happened. This is when Dr. Sinister calmly says to him, "you earthlings are so predictable." What, what, what?!!! That's right, there are a bunch of aliens on earth, and the only thing they can eat is human brains. They implanted these freaky parasitic worms onto Mike Hammer's head so as to harvest his gray matter more easily. The reason he had hairs coming out his nose, mouth, and forehead is that these little wormy parasites had already grown through his brain. Zoinks!

The third segment, set somewhere in the South, begins sort of like Major League and finishes up like Stir of Echoes. The easiest way to explain the gist of this section is to tell you about this weird, pulpy novel I read as a teenager. It was called "The Hand of Cain," and in the book, a murderer's hand was surgically implanted onto his brother's wrist. As you might expect, the brother found that his new hand made him want to kill people. This is almost exactly what happens in the movie, except that it's an eye and not a hand. At the first, successfull baseball player and family man Luke Skywalker gets in a car accident (whoah, just like real life!), and he loses an eye. After the transplant of his new eye (which is a generous donation from a man who was just executed for multiple murders), he starts seeing freaky things and digging in the backyard for hours at a time. Eventually, he decides killing people would be a rather good idea. Now, Luke and his wife are a religious pair, and I figured out pretty quickly that we were headed for a fantastic biblical tie-in with this whole eye thing. The movie did not disappoint in this respect. At the very end, Luke looks meaningfully at a pair of garden shears. The next moment, we see drops of blood spattering on the pages of an open Bible. The camera closes in on the page, revealing the passage: "if your eye offends thee, pluck it out." Didn't see that coming. HAHAHAHAHHA. Yep. Campy campy campy.

Well that's about it. John Carpenter's Body Bags is mild-schlock, Saturday afternoon horror fare. I'm not recommending it—I just wanted to tell you about it. If you want a film that's actually interesting, complex, and provocative, you should watch Melvin Goes to Dinner.

Tags: movies, scared