Showing posts with label David Warner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Warner. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

BODY BAGS (1993)

Made by Showtime as a test run for a "Tales from the Crypt"-style horror anthology show, BODY BAGS has horror legend John Carpenter dressed up like a corpse in a morgue.  He greets the audience and tells some fucking horrible jokes.  It's pretty bad.  Cheesy jokes are forgivable though as long as the stories are dope.  They're not...

"The Gas Station" The best thing I can say about this one is the main actress, Alex Datcher, is a good actress.  Unfortunately, the script gives her nothing to work with.  There's barely even a story.  She reports in for her first night as an overnight attendant at a secluded gas station.  Random people show up...including a serial killer.  That has the potential to be scary, but nothing here is even remotely scary.

"Hair" Stacy Keach (who's performance is the highlight of the entire movie) plays a dude who is super sad about his thinning hair.  He tries various concoctions, but none of them work.  Eventually, he goes to a hair growth doctor he saw on TV and before you know it, he's hairier than Cousin Itt's ballsack. 

"Eye" Luke Skywalker is an up and coming baseball player on his way to the big leagues.  Unfortunately, he can't drive for shit and while looking for a B-52's cassette (of all things), he wrecks his whip and ends up with piece of glass in his right eyeball.  The hospital replaces his damaged eyeball with an eye from a serial killer.  You can guess what happens next.

Book-ending the stories and sprinkled between them are more bad jokes by John Carpenter about drinking formaldehyde and stuff like that.  It's pretty easy to see why this was never made into a TV show.

BODY BAGS is more watchable now than it was in 1993, because when I watched it back then, it was just lame and the stories all drug on forever...but nowadays, it's an interesting time capsule full of 90's as fuck fashions and hair, a truly impressive cast of genre legends, Barney the Dinosaur on the cover of TV Guide, vintage electronics and so on. With a runtime of 91 minutes, there should have been four stories instead of three. Also, bump up the terror and blood. Three scary stories and one campy one. Or a mixture like in CREEPSHOW.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

THE OMEN (1976)

American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) must not have any faith in his wife's power of deduction, because when their child dies at birth, Thorn makes a quick deal with a hospital priest and switches out the dead baby for an orphan baby that just happened to be born at the same time!  Oh, brother!  The whole idea is completely ludicrous and unnecessary (simply have the evil priest switch the babies without anybody knowing about it), but I don't care, because it's all highly entertaining.

Ends up, this kid, Damien, is actually the Antichrist.  (In the Christian religion, Jesus Christ is suppose to be the good guy and this dude named Satan is the bad guy.  The Antichrist is like Satan's kid or 3rd cousin or something.)  But since he's still a little kid, Damien doesn't get all evil or anything.  Instead, he has protectors (evil nanny, another evil nanny, evil dog, etc.) and an unseen force that kills people who threaten Damien's secret identity.  It's awesome.  Eventually, the parents start to question if "their" kid is actually a normal child or maybe...the offspring of Satan.

Before re-watching THE OMEN for this review, I hadn't watched any of The Omen movies since I was a kid in the 1980's.  Revisiting it now, I was struck by how much this film reminded me of later horror ideas.  Most notably...the unseen force maneuvering items around to kill a particular person.  That was later popularized in the FINAL DESTINATION series.  The visual of Damien peddling his tricycle down the hallway "reminded" me of the Billy puppet from the SAW series.  (Yeah, I know there was a tricycle in 1980's THE SHINING also, but that one had a lower seat.)  Also, when you look closely at the baby skeleton in the graveyard, it looks very similar to the baby skeleton from Cannibal Corpse's classic "Butchered At Birth" artwork.

Overall, THE OMEN isn't as straight up badass as THE EXORCIST or ROSEMARY'S BABY, but it's still a damn good movie.  Good pace, excellent acting (all of the leads were great, especially Gregory Peck), suicide, zero nudity, neck stabbing, dog biting, solid direction, iconic visuals, great kills...including a decapitation scene that blew my mind when I was a kid! 

Over the years, THE OMEN story has become ingrained in popular culture.  It even had a big part in the awesome "Satanic Panic" movement of the 1970's through 1990's.  Highly recommended.  If you need me, I'll be in my room watching the "Damien" episode of South Park.

NSFW movie poster

Part 2 - Damien: Omen II (1978)
Part 3 - Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981)
Part 4 - Omen IV: The Awakening (1991)
Remake 1 - The Omen (2006)
Prequel - The First Omen (2024)