The Morguekeeper

Horror comes in many forms and three of them can be seen in the 1993 anthology film Body Bags. Primarily a John Carpenter production, with two stories directed by Carpenter and one by Tobe Hooper, it was originally intended to be a Showtime series designed to compete with HBO's Tales from the Crypt. I don't know how good the show might've been but as a film it's pretty good.

John Carpenter himself suffers the indignity of imitating the Cryptkeeper, appearing in host segments as a living cadaver who makes wisecracks about his fellow corpses. It's the only part of the movie that really doesn't work, though it's difficult to judge it on its own merits because most of the time I was just thinking, "You're not the Cryptkeeper, you'll never be the Cryptkeeper, and, let's face it, you don't really want to be the Cryptkeeper."

The best segment is the first story, "The Gas Station", directed by, though not written by, Carpenter himself.

Alex Datcher stars as Anne, a young woman on her first evening at work as an overnight gas station attendant. I really appreciated how Carpenter stayed with her point of view. We feel nervous for her with each new appearance by a strange customer who might be the killer. It's also one of those moments in an older film where I enjoy the novelty of a main character being genuinely working class. From the details of her desk routine and the business with the bathroom key the viewer's really left with the impression that someone who worked on this movie knew what it was like to work at a gas station.

Alex Datcher doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry but she's perfectly fine in the role. She's pretty and good at seeming genuinely scared. But the short is probably more notable for its cameos by David Naughton and Robert Carradine, not to mention two legendary horror directors, Wes Craven and Sam Raimi.

I thought the second story was nicely, perversely funny. "Hair" stars Stacy Keach, David Warner, Sheena Easton, and Deborah Harry. Keach plays a man obsessed with his thinning hair and David Warner is the sinister doctor who gives him more hair than he wants. And also tiny snakes.

The final story comes from Tobe Hooper and is a nice variation on the old "possessed by surgical transplant" story. In this case, Mark Hamill plays a baseball player who loses his eye. A pair of doctors played by none other than Roger Corman and John Agar replace it with a serial killer's eye. Things go as you might expect, which is to say, unhappily for Hamill's character and his wife, played by Twiggy.

I almost thought Hamill and Twiggy had unsimulated sex in this movie. In a very unsexy sex scene shot from behind the two, you can see between both their legs and it definitely looked like something was going into Twiggy. Inspecting screenshots, I saw what I think was a modesty sock on Hamill. It really looks like Twiggy was penetrated, though, so I almost think it's a strap-on. Which would raise a whole lot of questions. I'm still not sure what I was seeing.

No, I won't post the screenshots, you perverts! Watch the movie yourself. It's available on Shudder.

The Vamps Around These Parts

In the hot, dusty landscape of New Mexico, James Woods hunts vampires in John Carpenter's 1998 film, Vampires. There are plenty of good ideas behind the film, particularly combining a vampire film with a western, but the whole production is too cheap and too many points in the film weren't adequately thought through. When one recalls that From Dusk till Dawn was released two years before Vampires, Vampires seems even more of an embarrassment.

The film opens with a team of experienced vampire hunters, led by a man named Jack Crow (Woods), raiding a vampire nest in New Mexico.

And right away we're introduced to two problems that will persist throughout the film--James Woods is terribly miscast and every interior looks conspicuously like a sound stage. I mean, every god damned room is practically a high school gym. Just look at this room at a supposedly dive hotel:

I do want that couch and loveseat.

James Woods, the arch-nebbish, is so wrong for the role of the hard-bitten tough guy. Apparently he was last in a long list of people Carpenter tried to cast first--according to Wikipedia, "Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and R. Lee Ermey." Any one of those would have made more sense and R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, would've been an inspired choice. Can you just imagine? "Are you a vampire, maggot? Let me see your vampire face. You don't scare me, you worthless piece of scum!" That would sure make sense of all the movie's random lines about dicks.

Apparently one of Carpenter's influences for the film was The Wild Bunch and there is something William Holden-ish about James Woods. But the character of Jack Crow is a calloused brute in the way Holden just wasn't in The Wild Bunch.

The team has a whole system set up for yanking vampires into the sunlight with a winch attached to a car. They drive big, specially modified armoured cars, too. I thought, "These guys know their shit so they must hole up in some kind of fortress at night." But, no, the night after the raid they party in a motel with a bunch of strangers, complete with liquor and prostitutes.

And, yeah, that's a cheap motel room and not the living room from Family Ties.

Sheryl Lee plays one of the prostitutes named Katrina and she's the whole reason I watched this movie. Sadly, she's kind of wasted on it. I actually kind of like how Carpenter doesn't flesh out all his supporting characters. Jack Crow is the only one we get some backstory on. And that's realistic--we don't get backstories on most of the people we meet in life, we have to take our measure of them from what we see. It would've been nice if she'd had more lines, though. After a master vampire ambushes the crew, she gets bit between the thighs and gains a mental connexion with him, like Mina and Dracula. So Jack and Tony (Daniel Baldwin) unceremoniously drag her along.

They treat her like shit for no real good reason. Maybe that's to establish that these guys have been turned into sons of bitches by their vocations, an impression that would have been helped a lot with R. Lee Ermey in the Jack Crow role. But some of it just feels odd, like when Tony decides to tie Katrina naked to a bed.

There's a kind of half-hearted romantic subplot between the two but the best part about it is that Sheryl Lee seems to be confounded by the whole thing. I love the look on her face when Tony kisses her in the climax.

She seems just to be thinking, "What the fuck is going on?" Like I said, she doesn't get many lines but Lee shows how excellently she can deliver with just facial expressions and screams.

It really is a crime she didn't get more roles after Twin Peaks.

The Love of a Car

For some people, the only peace they can find is by devoting themselves to projects, away from other people. That certainly seems to be the case for a young man in 1983's Christine. John Carpenter's adaptation of a Stephen King novel I haven't read is partly a nice, raw tale of teenage misery and partly an admirably balls out, violent car chase flick. It's the story of a living car who kills people--and I have to admit, I was rooting for her by the end.

Arnie (Keith Gordon) is a prototypical nerd. He even wears tape on the middle of his black rimmed glasses after a bully crushes them. Yet, the cruelty and insensitivity he suffers from in greater and lesser degrees from parents and classmates is credible. His parents going ballistic about the idea that Arnie would buy a car on his own makes sense, yet their anger also believably crosses the line to disastrously inconsiderate of Arnie's natural need to assert himself.

No, I don't think Arnie is justified in acting more and more like an asshole, but it's also completely understandable. When it comes to the car, I'm inclined to interpret her as something like a wild animal. I've heard in King's novel, the car is definitely possessed by the spirit of a man who killed himself in the car while in Carpenter's film its lifeforce is left totally unexplained. I like Carpenter's concept a lot better. It's far more interesting to study the car and try to discern the nature of its personality and limits of its intelligence than it is to just see some guy's personality in it.

It really is sweet the way she returns the--admittedly compulsive--affection Arnie lavishes on her. And then I also find myself rooting for her because, if you think about it, even if she has the ability to heal herself, it's kind of hard for a car to arrange just the right circumstances where she can kill people. She needs speed and tenacity. My favourite part is when she pulls out of a burning gas station, on fire, to go after the last bully.

That being said, I also really like Harry Dean Stanton as the police detective. I love how sure he seems to be that Arnie's lying about painting the car after it'd been vandalised. As though he's somehow intuited that the car is a demon with healing powers. Stanton completely sells it.

In addition to a lot of '50s classics on Christine's radio, the film also has a particularly groovy synthesiser score from Carpenter.

Christine is available on Netflix in Japan.

Blended Cheese

A blowhard truck driver gets caught up in a story of magic and martial arts in 1986's Big Trouble in Little China. A more finely aged chunk of '80s American cheese you'll never find.

Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) actually comes off a lot like certain political YouTubers I've seen; he constantly complains and you sense he's not altogether as competent as he thinks he is. Well, you more than sense it in Jack's case--he's constantly at a loss, in one scene even knocking himself out at the beginning of a fight.

Sometimes the joke wears a bit thin because Kurt Russell does have charisma and Jack does seem like a basically decent guy so I'd have liked the bumbling toned down a notch.

The story is great fun, of course. What starts out feeling like some kind of spy thriller, where a girl is abducted at the airport, suddenly becomes a wuxia street fight film. And then there's electricity shooting from people's hands and some impressively grotesque monsters.

Director John Carpenter seems to have brought three sides of his personality to bear in this movie. There's the humour of They Live, the action/adventure of Escape from New York, and a little dose of Prince of Darkness fantasy horror. Also, I always like seeing Kim Cattrall. And she wears a groovy headdress in this one.

Big Trouble in Little China is available on Disney+ in many countries outside the U.S.

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Forgotten metal glowed beneath the lamp.
The night endures despite another dawn.
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Let's sleep with Errol Flynn on Basil's lawn.
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Beginning late, electric siren hums.
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An em'rald dress adorned the lady's crown.
A giant truck was stuck beneath the town.