Body Bags | |
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Theatrical release poster
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Genre | Sci-Fi Horror Comedy Thriller |
Written by | Billy Brown Dan Angel |
Directed by |
John Carpenter Tobe Hooper |
Starring |
Stacy Keach David Warner Sheena Easton Debbie Harry Mark Hamill Twiggy Robert Carradine |
Music by | John Carpenter Jim Lang |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language(s) | English |
Production | |
Executive producer(s) | Dan Angel John Carpenter Sandy King |
Producer(s) | Dan Angel Sandy King |
Cinematography | Gary Kibbe |
Editor(s) | Edward A. Warschilka |
Running time | 91 minutes |
Production company(s) | 187 Corp. Showtime Networks |
Release | |
Original release | 8 August 1993 (original airdate) |
Body Bags is a 1993 American horror anthology film originally made for television, featuring three unconnected stories, with bookend segments featuring John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper as deranged morgue attendees. It was directed by Carpenter, Hooper and Larry Sulkis. It first aired on 8 August 1993. It is notable for its numerous celebrity cameo appearances.
The first story, "The Gas Station", features Robert Carradine as a serial killer, with cameos by Sam Raimi and Wes Craven. "Hair" follows Stacy Keach as he receives a botched hair transplant that infests him with an alien parasite. "Eye" is another transplant story, this time featuring Mark Hamill as a baseball player who loses an eye in a car accident and receives a transplant, only to be taken over by the personality of the eye's previous owner, a murderous killer.
A creepy-looking coroner introduces three different horror tales involving his current work on cadavers in "body bags".
Anne is a young college student who arrives for her first job working the night shift at an all-night filling station near Haddonfield, Illinois (a reference to the setting of Carpenter's two Halloween films). The attending worker, Bill, tells her that a serial killer has broken out of a mental hospital, and cautions her not to leave the booth at the station without the keys because the door locks automatically. After Bill leaves, Anne is alone and the tension mounts as she deals with various late-night customers seeking to buy gas for a quick fill-up, purchase cigarettes or just use the restroom key, unsure whether any of them might be the escaped maniac. Eventually, when Anne suspects that the escaped killer is lurking around the gas station, she tries to call the police, only to find that the phone line is dead. Soon after that, she finds an elaborately grotesque drawing in the Restroom and then the dead body of a transient sitting in a pickup truck on the lift in one of the garage bays. She makes a phone call for help which results in her realization that "Bill", the attending worker she met earlier, is in fact the escaped killer, who has killed the real Bill and is killing numerous passers-by. She finds the real Bill's dead body in one of the lockers. Serial Killer "Bill" then reappears and attempts to kill Anne with a machete, breaking into the locked booth by smashing out the glass with a sledgehammer and then chasing her around the deserted garage. Just as he is about to kill her, a customer returns, having forgotten his credit card, and he wrestles the killer, giving Anne time to crush him under the vehicle lift.