History Film / BodyBags1993

* LargeHam: Carpenter chews the scenery constantly asthe Coroner, a very goofy character who makes death-related puns and treats the corpses he gets in as if they were living people.

* OhCrap: [[spoiler:When the real coroners start doing an autopsy on the fake Coroner, he can be seen mouthing "Oh no!" when one of them asks for a saw and begins to cut open the his skull.]]

* AndIMustScream: Even though Richard was in no position to, [[spoiler: due to wormlike parasites eating his brain, the zoom-in shot of his face shows he's doing so on the inside.]]
* AutopsySnackTime: The Coroner is introduced cutting a slab of meat with an electrical saw and preparing to eat it. [[spoiler:The real coroners at the end also make sure to get some coffee before starting their autopsy of the fake coroner, who's actually a zombie.]]
* AxCrazy: The killer in the first segment is an escaped mental patient who slaughters various people because he's either insane or just enjoys murder. Or both.
* AxeBeforeEntering: In "The Gas Station", the killer uses a sledgehammer to smash out the reinforced glass in the cashier booth, and then knock down the bathroom door after Anne locks herself inside.
* BadassBystander: The customer who forgot his credit card in the first segment ends up helping Anne kill the serial killer.
* BaldnessAngst: In the segment "Hair", the main character's fear of losing his hair is what leads the main character to try out an experimental drug that gifts him with a massive mane of hair overnight. [[spoiler:Then it ''keeps'' growing, and he realizes that the "hair" is actually a living creature.]]
* BigDamnHeroes: In "The Gas Station", [[spoiler:the customer Pete returns at the end to help Anne beat the killer when he remembered he left his credit card behind. Despite him being quickly overtaken by the maniac, it's this intervention that allows Anne to set her death trap for him.]]
* BodyHorror: In "Hair", Richard gets a mystery treatment that results in him growing shoulder-length hair within a day's time. The hair then just keeps growing and eventually covers his face as well as other places where hair doesn't usually grow... all while wormlike parasites burrow underneath his skin. [[spoiler:It turns out to be part of an alien invasion plot to find new human hosts and brain food to dine on.]]
* BrainFood: [[spoiler:The hair growth experiment in "Hair" is actually part of a scheme by wormlike alien invaders to take over human hosts and eat their brains.]]
* CareerEndingInjury: In "Eye", Brent is a baseball relief hitter who loses his right eye in a car accident. With no depth perception, he can no longer bat at a professional level. He agrees to the experimental eye transplant surgery in an attempt to save his career.
* ChekhovsGunman: [[spoiler:In "The Gas Station", one of the early customers is one of the few people who are nice to the female clerk but forgets his credit card even though she runs after him. After he remembers this, he returns at the end to save her from an attack by a psychopathic killer.]]
* ColdTurkeysAreEverywhere: When Richard is obsessing over his hair loss in "Hair", he leaves the hairdresser and is immediately confronted by women with long beautiful hair, and then men with long beautiful hair; one of whom is walking an Afghan hound with long beautiful hair. When he gets home, his television is showing ads for shampoo, and one for fertilizer showing rapidly sprouting grass.
* CreatorCameo: Besides John Carpenter as the Coroner, Tobe Hooper also appears in the wraparound as one of the morgue workers who show up at the end of the film.
* CreepyGasStationAttendant: An escaped mental patient from "The Gas Station" kills [[spoiler:a gas station owner, assumes his identity and then moves on to the customers.]]
* CreepyMortician: John Carpenter portrays the Coroner, a wacky character who has a twisted fascination with the corpses he gets every night and hosts the framing segments. Among other things he holds conversations with the dead people around him and even [[ILoveTheDead plays around with some of them]]. [[spoiler:Subverted at the end when he turns out to be another corpse come to life when the real coroners appear.]]
* DeadAllAlong: [[spoiler:The Coroner is revealed to be one of the corpses being stored at the morgue who had apparently come to life to mess around with the corpses and entertain the audience with his stories of how the bodies died while the real coroners were away.]]
* DeadlyNosebleed: The serial killer from "The Gas Station" gets slammed in the face by Anne. When he gets up again, his bleeding nose indicates how severe that blow was and he falls down again. [[spoiler:He eventually gets up once more.]]
* DeadPersonImpersonation: In "The Gas Station", [[spoiler:Anne's co-worker Bill isn't the ''real'' Bill, as she finds out. He's actually the escaped serial killer mentioned on the radio earlier on and has been impersonating the original gas station owner.]]
* DeconstructedTrope: Though the killer in "The Gas Station" is a persistent threat, he's still just a regular person, so he can't easily shake off injuries like standard slasher movie villains. After getting hit in the face with a chair, he falls over twice in succession and struggles to regain his bearings.
* DevilComplex: In "Eye", John Randall is mentioned to have called himself The Devil.
* DodgyToupee: Richard in "Hair" gets a really bad toupee to cover up his hair loss that his girlfriend and his hairdresser both dismiss as just making him look insecure.
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:Brent from "Eye" is unable to take the hallucinations any longer and stabs himself in his transplanted eye.]]
** [[spoiler:Also Richard from "Hair", according to the coroner: Apparently he eventually proceeded to jump from the top of a building... landing on top of a moving car... which then swerved in front of a train. What remained of Richard was then dragged 900 yards under the engine.]]
* DropTheHammer: In "The Gas Station", the killer gains access to the locked gas station booth by bashing the front window in with a sledgehammer.
* EvilGloating: [[spoiler:The parasitic aliens at the end of "Hair" love to gloat to Richard that he fell right into their trap due to his vanity and take him to another room to spend his last conscious moments before he becomes fully brain dead. After this Richard either regained enough consciousness to kill himself or was pushed to it by the aliens.]]
* EyeScream:
** With a segment called "Eye", what would you expect? The protagonist loses his eye twice through impalement.
** "Hair" also includes wormlike parasites emerging from a human eye.
* FatalFlaw: Discussed in "Hair". If it wasn't for Richard's [[{{Pride}} vanity]] to want a full head of hair at any cost, [[spoiler:the parasitic aliens would never have been able to use him as another host and eat his brain.]]
* {{Foreshadowing}}: In "Hair", when Richard and the Doctor first talk, the Doctor is rather condescending and gives Richard a slightly mocking smile. Initially, it seems it's just his being a bit pompous and stuck up, but it actually reflects the contempt he holds Richard in, as becomes evident at the end of the story.
** The Doctor's company is called the [[spoiler:Roswell surgery. That's a clear reference to the infamous alleged alien landing - and the Doctor himself is an alien too.]]
* FreezeFrameBonus: If you're attentive enough, you can guess who's behind the whole thing in "Gas Station" at the very beginning. [[spoiler: The camera lingers for a second over the real Bill's picture, and you can see it's not the guy Anne had talked to earlier. However, they look similar enough to miss this on the first viewing.]]
* FreudianExcuse: Brent in "Eye" finds out through the dead serial killer John Randall's visions that he was horribly abused by his mother, such as putting out cigarettes in his face when he was still in his crib.
* GasStationOfDoom: There's one segment appropriately named "The Gas Station" that played out like a SlasherMovie. A new attendant working the night shift is stalked by a lone killer as she tries to fight him off.
* {{Hallucinations}}: Brent's new eye gives him very grisly hallucinations where he re-lives the experiences of John Randall, the donor source of his new eye.

* ALoveToDismember: The Coroner grabs two dismembered heads and makes them kiss each other. [[spoiler:This gets even weirder when it turns out that he's actually a zombie himself.]]
* ImplacableMan: The killer in "The Gas Station" suffers a lot of abuse by the heroine, but keeps getting up each time to pursue her once again until [[spoiler:he finally gets crushed underneath a car.]]
* LargeHam: John Carpenter as the Coroner is chewing the scenery during his segments with a very goofy character who constantly makes death-related puns and treats the corpses he gets in as if they were living people.
* MacheteMayhem: The killer in "The Gas Station" uses a machete as his main weapon to kill his victims.
* MagicalEye: In the "Eye", Brent, a star baseball player, gets a new right eye after he loses his original one in a car accident. He subsequently becomes plagued by nightmarish visions of murder and rape and finds out that it belonged to [[spoiler:an executed serial killer named John Randall, whose personality is starting to overtake his own]].
* MoodWhiplash: Lurches between suspense, light-hearted horror-comedy, and supernatural shock tactics, which is exacerbated by the goofy wraparound segments.

* NeverTrustAHairTonic: In the "Hair" segment, a balding guy goes to a new clinic to get an experimental hair transplant. It works, but then his hair keeps growing all over his body. At one point he even has to pull a new hair out of ''his tooth''. [[spoiler:It turns out the "hair" are really spindly aliens who want to eat his brain.]]

* OhCrap: [[spoiler:When the real coroners start doing an autopsy on the Coroner, the Coroner can be seen mouthing "Oh, no" when one of them asks for a head saw and begins to cut open the Coroner's skull.]]
* PeekabooCorpse: In "The Gas Station", Anne is startled when she runs into the bathroom, yanks open one of the lockers, and [[spoiler:dead Bill]]'s corpse falls out.
* PrehensileHair: "Hair" features Creator/StacyKeach's character receiving a hair transplant operation, which turns out to be [[spoiler:an alien parasite that bites him after he plucks a hair from his ''tooth!'' The aliens eat up his brains.]]
* PungeonMaster: John Carpenter's character, the Coroner, makes several death-related puns every other minute.
* PuppeteerParasite: [[spoiler:The second segment's eponymous "hair" are actually tiny aliens who need human brains as a food source to survive. They trick vain people into getting their "hair treatment" to acquire new hosts.]]
* RapidHairGrowth: The "Hair" segment features a balding middle-aged guy who receives a mystery treatment from a strange healthcare society. He grows a giant mane of hair overnight, but the hair just keeps growing all over his body, ''including on his teeth''. It turns out that [[spoiler:the "hairs" are actually parasitic wormlike aliens who need human brains for food and it's already too late for him.]]
* RedHerring: [[spoiler:Every customer at the gas station]] in the first segment is implied to have nefarious designs on the heroine, but they all turn out to be unrelated to the real killer.
* RewatchBonus: First time watching Hair, the Doctor's pompous and slightly mocking behaviour towards Richard at his consultation just makes him appear a bit stuck up. Of course, once you have seen the ending once when rewatching the film, it's striking just how contemptuous the doctor is of Richard, for reasons that become all too apparent by the end of the film.
* SerialKiller: There’s a psychotic killer on the loose in “The Gas Station”.
* ShearMenace: In "The Eye", Brent tries to murder his own wife with a garden shear when the late John Randall's visions turn him into a murderous lunatic as well.
* ShoutOut: The killer in "The Gas Station" segment is reported to also have escaped from a mental institution in [[Franchise/{{Halloween}} Haddonfield, Illinois]].
* SlashedThroat: The fate of one of the customers and [[spoiler:the real manager]] in "The Gas Station" is a slit-throat.
* SlasherMovie: The segment "The Gas Station" plays out like a typical slasher with a mystery killer murdering various people and menacing the heroine.
* SpaceWhaleAesop: From the segment "Hair". Being so insecure about hair loss that one is willing to try out mystery experiments will result in [[spoiler:becoming a host for parasitic wormlike aliens who will snack on your brain.]]
* SuddenDownerEnding: Granted a potentially awful ending should not be much of a surprise in a horror story but [[spoiler: when it occurs to the most light-hearted, humorous and campy of the stories by far, "Hair" it stands out. To stretch this point even further it even has a comedic tune playing over its entirety and there isn't any build-up or threat in the ambience very much unlike the other too. And yet is the one with the worst of the three endings where TheBadGuyWins with the previously happy theme echoing over the sight of the main character losing any claim he may have held to, over his own body and brain and offering us an uncalled amount of SoundtrackDissonance]].
* TitleDrop: The Coroner introduces all the stories connected to the new corpses that come in.
-->'''The Coroner:''' Body Bags! See, when it's suicide or murder or an accident they put them in these bags.
* TomatoSurprise: [[spoiler:John Carpenter's character the Coroner initially seems to be just an intensely weird mortician. There are several hints dropped throughout his segments, including his consumption of the lethal chemical formaldehyde and his lifeless, pale skin, but it isn't revealed until the very end that he's actually another corpse who assumed the role of the real morticians.]]
* WhamShot:
** If the Coroner removing his scrubs, [[spoiler:revealing his wound]] at the end doesn't count, then [[spoiler:him hopping up onto a gurney, revealing [[DeadAllAlong his toe tag]]]] certainly does.
** "The Gas Station": As Anne attempts to call for help, viewers see what's on the other end: a smashed picture frame and a bloody machete moving into view. [[spoiler:It's a picture of the ''real'' Bill, and the camera soon pans up to reveal a DeadPersonImpersonation was pulled]].
* WhamLine:
** From "Hair", the twist becomes clear with this line:
--->'''Dr. Lock''': [[spoiler:You earthlings and your vanity! You are so predictably easy.]]
** The true nature of the Coroner becomes apparent at the end when he hears two people approaching:
--->'''Coroner''': Uh-oh! Better get moving! (removes his scrubs, revealing [[spoiler: a bloody wound on his side]])
----

* AndIMustScream: Even though Richard was in no position to, [[spoiler: due to wormlike parasites eating his brain, the zoom in shot of his face shows he's doing so on the inside.]]

* AxeBeforeEntering: In the "The Gas Station", the killer uses a sledgehammer to smash out the reinforced glass in the cashier booth, and then to knock down the bathroom door after Anne locks herself inside.

* ChekhovsGunman: [[spoiler:In "The Gas Station", one of the early customers is one of the few people who's nice to the female clerk but forgets his credit card even though she runs after him. After he remembers this, he returns at the end to save her from an attack by a psychopathic killer.]]

* CreatorCameo: Besides John Carpenter as the Coroner, Tobe Hooper also appears in the wraparound as one of the morgue workers who shows up at the end of the film.

* DodgyToupee: Richard in "Hair" gets a really bad toupee to cover up his hair loss that his girlfriend and his hair dresser both dismiss as just making him look insecure.

* DropTheHammer: In "The Gas Station", the killer gains access to the locked gas station booth by bashing the front window in with a sledge hammer.
* EvilGloating: [[spoiler:The parasitic aliens at the end of "Hair" love to gloat to Richard that he fell right into their trap due to his vanity and take him to another room to spend his last conscious moments before he becomes fully braindead. After this Richard either regained enough consciousness to kill himself, or was pushed to it by the aliens.]]

* FreezeFrameBonus: If you're attentive enough, you can guess who's behind the whole thing in "Gas Station" at the very beginning. [[spoiler: The camera lingers for a second over real Bill's picture, and you can see it's not the guy Anne had talked to earlier. However, they look similar enough to miss this on the first viewing.]]

* RapidHairGrowth: The "Hair" segment features a balding middle-aged guy who receives a mystery treatment from a strange health care society. He grows a giant mane of hair overnight, but the hair just keeps growing all over his body, ''including on his teeth''. It turns out that [[spoiler:the "hairs" are actually parasitic wormlike aliens who need human brains for food and it's already too late for him.]]

* RewatchBonus: First time watching Hair, the Doctor's pompous and slightly mocking behaviour towards Richard at his consultation just makes him appear a bit stuck up. Of course, once you have seen the ending once, when rewatching the film, it's striking just how contemptuous the doctor is of Richard, for reasons that become all too apparent by the end of the film.

* SlashedThroat: The fate of one of the customers and [[spoiler:the real manager]] in "The Gas Station" is a slit throat.

** The true nature of the Coroner becomes apparent at the end, when he hears two people approaching:

* GagBoobs: Checking trough the body cabinets (or as he likes to call them, "[[ILoveTheDead necrophile]] cabinets"), The Coroner comes across a body of a woman with enormous fake breasts.
-->'''The Coroner''': These ought to be recycled.

* EvilGloating: [[spoiler:The parasitic aliens at the end of "Hair" love to gloat to Richard that he fell right into their trap due to his vanity and take him to another room to spend his last conscious moments before he becomes fully braindead.]]

* IAteWhat: The Coroner downs a few glasses of the lethal chemical formaldehyde to set the mood. [[spoiler:[[{{Foreshadowing}} You know, just in case you needed a definitive clue that he's a zombie.]]]]

-->'''Dr. Lock''': [[spoiler:You earthlings and your vanity! You are so predictably easy.]]

* Foreshadowing: In "Hair", when Richard and the Doctor first talk, the Doctor is rather condescending and gives Richard a slightly mocking smile. Initially, it seems it's just his being a bit pompous and stuck up, but it actually reflects the contempt he holds Richard in, as becomes evident at the end of the story.

* IAteWhat: The Coroner downs a few glasses of the lethal chemical formaldehyde to set the mood.

* RealityEnsues: Though the killer in "The Gas Station" is a persistent threat, he's still just a regular person, so he can't easily shake off injuries like standard slasher movie villains. After getting hit in the face with a chair, he falls over twice in succession and struggles to regain his bearings.

* CareerEndingInjury: In "Eye", Brent is baseball relief hitter who loses his right eye in a car accident. With no depth perception, he can no longer bat at a professional level. He agrees to the experimental eye transplant surgery in an attempt to save his career.

* ColdTurkeysAreEverywhere: When Richard is obsessing over his hair loss in "Hair", he leaves the hairdresser and is immediately confronted by women with long beautiful hair, and then men with long beautiful; one of whom is walking an Afghan hound with long beautiful hair. When he gets home, his television is showing ads for shampoo, and one for fertilizer showing rapidly sprouting grass.

* DeadAllAlong: [[spoiler:The Coroner is revealed to be one of the corpses being stored at the morgue.]]

* IDrankWhat: The Coroner downs a few glasses of the lethal chemical formaldehyde to set the mood.

* MummiesAtTheDinnerTable: The coroner props up a mutilated corpse to give him psychological advice. Of course, he's a lost cause.

The final segment, "Eye", is about Brent Matthews (Creator/MarkHamill), a professional baseball player who loses his eye in a horrible car accident. Not wanting to end his career, he allows himself to undergo an experimental surgery to have his ruined eye replaced. After a while, Brent begins seeing horrific visions of dead bodies, as well as himself murdering women, with his new eye. He learns that his new eye was donated to John Randle, a maniac who murdered women and violated their bodies who was recently executed, and the disturbing visions are the result of Randle's spirit possessing Brent through his eye to continue his killing spree.

The final segment, "Eye", is about Brent Matthews (Creator/MarkHamill), a professional baseball player who loses his eye in a horrible car accident. Not wanting to end his career, he allows himself to undergo an experimental surgery to have his ruined eye replaced. After a while, Brent begins seeing horrific visions of dead bodies, as well as himself murdering women, with his new eye. He learns that his new eye was donated to John Randle, a maniac who murdered women and violated their bodies who was recently executed, and the disturbing visions are the result of Randle's spirit possessing Brent to continue his killing spree.

The final segment, "Eye", is about Brent Matthews (Creator/MarkHamill), a baseball player who loses his right eye in a car accident and gets a replacement that used to belong to a maniac.

"Hair" centers around Richard (Creator/StacyKeach), a balding, middle-aged man who is extremely insecure and self-conscious about his thinning hairline. As his insecurities begin driving a wedge between himself and his girlfriend, he decides to undergo a "miraculous" treatment in order to give himself new hair. At first, the transplant seems to be a success, with Richard growing a full head of hair overnight. But after a few days, Richard begins feeling sick and fatigued as the hair begins growing longer and longer, even in places where hair doesn't normally grow.

"Hair" centers around Richard (Creator/StacyKeach), a balding, middle-aged man who decides to undergo treatment in order to keep his locks, with gruesome results.

"The Gas Station" is about Anne (Alex Datcher), a new hire at an isolated filling station near Haddonfield, IL, where a serial killer has escaped from the insane asylum and is prowling about (and it ain't [[Franchise/{{Halloween}} Michael]]). Anne must outwit the lunatic to make it to the end of the night shift.

* {{Hallucinations}}: Brent's new eye gives him very grisly hallucinations where he rel-lives the experiences of John Randall, the donor source of his new eye.

* BadassBystander: The customer who forgot his credit card in the first segment.

* CreatorCameo: Besides Carpenter, Tobe Hooper also appears in the wraparound.

* {{Hallucinations}}: Brent's new eye gives him very grisly ones.

* SerialKiller: There’s one on the loose in “The Gas Station”.

* SlashedThroat: The fate of one of the customers and [[spoiler:the real manager]] in "The Gas Station".

* SuddenDownerEnding: Granted a potentially awful ending should not be much of a surprise in a horror story but [[spoiler: when it occurs to the most light-hearted, humorous and campy of the stories by far, "Hair" it stands out. To stretch this point even further it even has a comedic tune playing over its entirety and there isn't any build-up or threat in the ambience very much unlike the other too. And yet is the one with the worst of the three endings where TheBadGuyWins with the previously happy theme echoing over the sight of the main character losing any claim he may held to, over his own body and brain and offering us an uncalled amount of SoundtrackDissonance]].

* CareerEndingInjury: In "Eye", Brent is baseball relief who loses his right eye in a car accident. With no depth perception, he can no longer bat at a professional level. He agrees to the experimental eye transplant surgery in an attempt to save his career.

* CareerEndingInjury: In "Eye", Brent is baseball pitcher who loses his right eye in a car accident. He agrees to the experimental eye transplant surgery in an attempt to save his career.

* WhamShot: If the Coroner removing his scrubs, [[spoiler:revealing his wound]] at the end doesn't count, then [[spoiler:him hopping up onto a gurney, revealing [[DeadAllAlong his toe tag]]]] certainly does.

* CreepyGasStationAttendant: An escaped mental patient from "The Gas Station" kills [[spoiler:a gas station owner, assumes his identity,]] and begins murdering customers.

"The Gas Station" is about Anne, a new hire at an isolated filling station near Haddonfield, IL, where a serial killer has escaped from the insane asylum and is prowling about (and it ain't [[Franchise/{{Halloween}} Michael]]). Anne must outwit the lunatic to make it to the end of the night shift.

"Hair" centers around a balding, middle-aged man who decides to undergo treatment in order to keep his locks, with gruesome results.