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Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

A nice, fun little collaboration. Lots of appearances from familiar faces including Wes Craven, Blondie, and Twiggy. John Carpenter is great as the quirky morgue worker in between segments and his first piece is probably the best in the anthology. Tobe Hooper's addition was also surprisingly good, I really expected something more cringeworthy from late Hooper and although it wasn't exactly original it was still engaging and well made. Although I suspect Tobe probably isn't as good an actor himself as Carpenter seeing as how they placed him as morgue employee for all of ten seconds at the end.

A mixed bag amongst an impressive body of work, John Carpenter's "Body Bags" is an inessential yet perfectly enjoyable digression. What was originally conceived as the pilot for what would've been a full- fledged series (ala HBO's "Tales From The Crypt,") instead emerged as a TV movie on the Showtime network. A three-part horror anthology spliced with cut scenes featuring the director himself as an undead mortician, "Body Bags" is an oddity that the Carpenter faithful (as well as any fan of anthologies and/or horror-comedy) will want to seek out, but not necessarily required viewing.To hear John Carpenter tell it on the featurette included with the Scream Factory Blu-Ray, "Body Bags" was anything but a passion project. In fact, the director claims he didn't even like anthology films! That being the case, it certainly doesn't show in the final product. Whether it's the goofy intermissions from Carpenter hamming it up in full-on rotting makeup or the slew of horror-friendly cameos, "Body Bags" looks and feels like a big boat-load of fun. Maybe it was intended as an easy payday, but that vibe certainly doesn't translate to the screen.The first segment is a very Carpenter-esque tale. "The Gas Station" finds a young woman (Alex Datcher) working her first graveyard shift at a gas station just outside of Haddonfield, IL (the same location from "Halloween," for those keeping score). Thankfully she is protected by a thick glass partition between her and creeps like Buck Flowers (!), but when she steps out for a brief second, the door locks behind her and things quickly get out of hand. Featuring the director's signature slow-burning suspense methods, "The Gas Station" is the smoothest of the three segments to go down and may very well even get under your skin if you let it. Look out for cameos from Wes Craven, Sam Raimi and David Naughton.Next up comes "Hair." Certainly the silliest of the three segments, this one follows Stacy Keach as an aging womanizer who is obsessed with with his rapidly diminishing hairline. In order to keep his young ladyfriend (Sheena Easton) at his side, he enlists the help of a deceiving miracle drug salesman, played by the indispensable David Warner. Before long, he realizes he got more than he bargained for when tiny alien lifeforms start taking over his face. A showcase for Keach's undeniable commitment to the material and some truly impressive special effects (at least by 1993 TV standards), "Hair" doesn't have much else going for it. Not bad, but definitely could have used some trimming.Finally, the film wraps with "Eye." For this piece, the director's chair is passed to none other than Tobe Hooper. This one is a little darker and more mean-spirited than the other two. In it, a minor league baseball player at the top of his game succumbs to a brutal car accident that leaves him with only one eye. As in "Hair," our hapless hero gets more than he wished for when his new implant takes him down dark paths. Mark Hamill plays the sympathetic character gone bad to perfection, alongside model Twiggy, who plays his devoted wife. This one is well done to be sure, but not quite as "fun" as the other two. Hamill's creepy performance goes a long way in elevating the material, delivering some moments you aren't soon to forget.When you zip it all up, "Body Bags" is a nice chunk of late-night entertainment that more or less delivers. It's not a classic in either Carpenter or Hooper's oeuvre, but worth looking into regardless. While it would have been great to have seen what a weekly horror anthology series hosted by Carpenter would have looked like, this brief glimpse will have to suffice.

In this early-90s, Tales From The Crypt-style, made-for-TV anthology from masters of horror John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, creepy morgue attendee The Coroner (played by Carpenter, whose acting is nowhere near as good as his directing) unzips three tales of the macabre…Tale number one, The Gas Station, is directed by Carpenter, and stars Alex Datcher as Anne, whose first night as a gas station attendant doesn't go quite as planned when she is targeted by a serial killer. Operating well within his comfort zone, Carpenter returns to the same bag of tricks he used years earlier for his seminal blockbuster Halloween, delivering a tense, atmospheric piece that, while not exactly groundbreaking thematically or visually (one shot, in particular, is lifted directly from Halloween), still proves to be a lot of fun. Datcher makes for a likable scream queen, there's quite a bit of enjoyment to be had from guessing which of the station's patrons might be the killer, and we get a few welcome cameos from some well-known horror luminaries.Hair, Carpenter's second offering, also sees the director visiting familiar territory: a They Live-style story of aliens operating undercover on Earth, it sees desperate, balding, middle-aged man Richard Coberts (Stacy Keach) visiting an experimental hair clinic that guarantees overnight results. Unfortunately for Richard, his new lustrous locks are actually minute parasitic extraterrestrials that intend to feed on his brain!!! With such a patently silly concept, Carpenter has no option but to play this one for laughs, and amazingly, it works, with the balding Keach proving that he has quite the sense of humour. Hair also features decent turns from David Warner as sinister Dr. Lock, Debbie Harry as his kooky nurse, and Sheena Easton as Cobert's sexy girlfriend Megan.In contrast to the light-hearted nature of Hair, the third and final segment, Eye, is a much darker affair. Directed by Tobe Hooper, it tells of up and coming baseball player Brent Matthews (Mark Hamill), whose career looks to be over when he crashes his car, losing his right eye as a result (a shard of glass piercing the organ). However, thanks to a revolutionary eye-transplant procedure, he regains full vision, but at a cost: his new eyeball causes him to have horrific visions and gradually alters his personality. Yet another scary story to borrow heavily from horror classic The Hands of Orlac, this is extremely derivative stuff, but thanks to solid direction from Hooper, some cool gore, a surprisingly strong central performance from Hamill, and a neat downbeat ending, Eye proves to be a delightfully twisted and thoroughly enjoyable way to wrap up this fun little flick.

John Carpenter has some range as an actor, as the prologue and epilogue of BODY BAGS makes clear. We've seen him play it straight (THE FOG), but here we get to see him at his best, doing something that seems more akin to what he SHOULD'VE been doing all along: slabstick humor. As The Coroner, he's a wise-ass cracking wise and, in the end, getting his (whether he deserves it or not). His makeup is great (I kept the photo from TV Guide for years) and his timing is flawless. Unlike the rickety puppet that hosted the TALES FROM THE CRYPT series, Carpenter's coroner is a living(?), breathing(?) (g)host with a sense of humor (dark though it may be). It would've been nice to have seen this show continue on as a series (or a series of movies) with Carpenter at the helm. (George Romero's phoned-in job of hosting on the dreadful DEADTIME STORIES gives one an idea of just how good Carpenter's turn was.)