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.

Monday, May 17, 2021

SAW III (2006)

Ahhh yeah sk8er boi, after being left to die in that crummy bathroom at the end of part 2, Detective Donnie Wahlberg brings a whole new definition to the term “footloose” and manages to escape...or does he? Fast-forward a few months and there’s some new Jigsaw games popping up, but this time they’re different: they don’t have a guaranteed escape like the older traps did. Could there be a copycat Jigsaw killer on the loose? Meow?! At the same time, a doctor is mysteriously kidnapped from a hospital and a real Jigsaw victim wakes up in a box. Eeek!

Maggot-covered pig corpses, a slower pace than in part 2, less interesting new characters (the doctor character was boring!), Jigsaw still preaching that bullshit lie about how being alive is a good thing, mild blood, zero sex, a larger suspension of disbelief required than in the previous films.  SAW III is a step down from the two previous films, but not by much and it's still enjoyable.  It moves the overall story along without getting too jumbled up.

Worth watching, but nothing to get overly excited about.

Part 1 - Saw (2004)
Part 2 - Saw II (2005)
Part 4 - Saw IV (2007)
Part 5 - Saw V (2008)
Part 6 - Saw VI (2009)
Part 7 - Saw 3D (2010)
Part 8 - Jigsaw (2017)
Part 9 - Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)
Part 10 - Saw X (2023)