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.

THE KARATE KID (1984)

"Go find the balance."

When twenty-something year old teenager Daniel Larusso's (Ralph Macchio) mother upends his life by moving from New Jersey to Los Angeles for a job, Daniel bitches and complains, but makes the best of it by (literally on his second day in town) hanging out at the beach with the dude from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI: JASON LIVES and mackin' on Ali Mills (Elisabeth Shue).  Shue's ex-boyfriend, Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and his gang of karate buddies come rolling up on their motorcycles all pre-THE LOST BOYS style and bring the ruckus.  Daniel ends up getting kicked in his pretty face.  This violent behavior helps push Ali into Daniel's arms.  At the same time, Daniel befriends his apartment complex's handyman Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), who's a secret karate badass.  The tensions between Johnny and Daniel keep rising (another more brutal beat down, Daniel pushed down a hill, Daniel destroying Johnny's weed, etc.) until finally they agree to fight it out once and for all at a local karate championship in two months.  Unfortunately, Daniel doesn't know karate.  This is where Mr. Miyagi steps in.

THE KARATE KID is a great movie.  Yes, it's dated and anybody with mild intelligence can correctly predict the ending, but it doesn't matter because the journey is so much fun.  Multiple memorable characters that became 80's cultural icons, perfect pace, impressive photography (that long shot when they enter the championship was bad ass!), excellent acting, awesome music, wonderful onscreen chemistry between the entire cast, beautiful California locations, cool skeleton Halloween costumes, tons of memorable scenes and quotes, a masterful script that blurs the lines of good guy/bad guy and creates characters that are very human, a number of interesting actors as supporting characters, skeleton getting kicked in the nards, one of those rare endings that leaves the viewer equally satisfied and wanting more.

Highly recommended.  Anybody interested in 1980's American culture (or just wanting to see a good movie) should watch THE KARATE KID.  If you need me, I'll be out in the backyard painting the fence...both sides.

[Post-review side note: If you like THE KARATE KID, then you should watch "Cobra Kai".  It's an amazing show that is so much fun that it actually makes the original film better!  Check it out.]

Part 2 - The Karate Kid Part II (1986)
Part 3 - The Karate Kid Part III (1989)
Part 4 - The Next Karate Kid (1994)
Remake - The Karate Kid (2010)