THE MILLION DOLLAR DUCK (1971)

Scientist Dean Jones is living beyond his means. He has a nice house in a good neighborhood, a wife, a kid…and a pile of overdue bills higher than a giraffe's pussy! Life is looking pretty bleak. It also doesn’t help that his wife is so intellectually disabled that she’d fit right in with Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in DUMB AND DUMBER. I’m not kidding. As the film begins, she trying to "economize" by making homemade apple sauce with cinnamon, mustard, curry powder and garlic for Dean’s work lunch. Yeah, that’s going to keep the bill collectors away. Anyway, Dean goes to work and a duck in his lab eats the insane apple sauce concoction then accidentally gets radiated. If this was a horror movie, the duck would start ripping out necks and pecking people’s peckers with his evil beak, but this is a Disney movie, so instead, it starts shitting out gold eggs all over the joint. You’d think that would be a good thing, but since Dean, who’s not the brightest bulb himself, surrounds himself with only idiots, everything quickly gets way out of control.

For what it is, THE MILLION DOLLAR DUCK is a fun film. Quick pace, goofy story, Herman and the Purple Cows on the radio, some absolutely adorable women's fashions on Sandy Duncan, a few laughs, an impressive cast full of familiar faces, interesting old laws about hoarding gold, vintage cars and fashions, an old Jack in the Box sign, a dangerous-looking duck stunt that made me sad, some place called "Gay 90's" (sadly, I think it was a restaurant), a Richard Nixon impersonation, a wacky car chase, Kurt Russell's father (Bing Russell), a confusing ending that left me with a lot of unanswered questions. TMDD might be dated, but it’s still an enjoyable ride.  I've seen it a number of times over the years and always smile.

Also, the title THE MILLION DOLLAR DUCK is just a great name for a film. I’d love to see a remake, or maybe even a prequel that explains how Dean Jones and Sandy Duncan’s characters ever got together in the first place! That’s gotta be an interesting story!

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.