Carpenter himself plays The Coroner, our Cryptkeeper of sorts, who entertains the audience with stroke-inducingly bad jokes (which I love), and introduces the segments, of which there are three.

The first is “Gas Station”, a by-the-numbers example of how to take a scary location and run with it, building tension and keeping things rolling along like a runaway hearse without trying to pump a bunch of pace-ruining drivel in to make yourself seem clever and ruin the mood. Anne has taken a job at one of those lock-yourself-in-a-bunker-and-take-money-through-a-window gas stations out in the middle of nowhere. A few people roll through, she locks herself out of the booth, a homeless guy shows up and draws some freaky devil stuff on the bathroom wall…and then her boss tries to kill her. Not exactly a surprise ending, but a great little piece because of its simplicity. Girl alone in scary place, someone hunts girl in scary place, kills off bystanders, girl fights killer. It’s hard (possible, but hard) to screw that up. Especially when you’re John Carpenter.

Then we have what is easily the weirdest of the segments, “Hair”. Stacy Keach is a balding man who distresses over his departing locks. He sees a commercial for a new hair-regrowth system called the Roswell Formula (which should have been his first clue). Sure enough, in just days he has enough hair to audition for Iced Earth, but his vanity came with a price. His new hair is actually a hive of alien worms, and Dr. Lock from the Roswell Formula company is their leader. The idea is that because humans are so vain (I bet you think this review is about you, don’t you?), they’re going to wait until all the men go bald and then implant hair worms in their heads so they can take over the world. Wow, now that I actually put into words the plot of this segment, it’s really, really stupid. But, if you can ignore how retarded the premise of an alien hair invasion is, it’s actually not a bad way to kill twenty minutes. Plus, you get to see stop-motion alien hair worms grow out of Stacy Keach’s throat.

Finally, we have a take on a classic story which teaches us the lesson that no matter how long your recipient list is for organs, you shouldn’t resort to transplanting bits and bobs from serial killers. Mark Hamill plays Brent Matthews, a baseball player who gets a piece of wood rammed through his right eye because he ran his car off the road trying to change cassette tapes (no, Garfield, I don’t mean CD’s!). His new eye begins to cause personality changes and hallucinations, biting his wife during sex and seeing visions of hands in the garbage disposal and dead girls buried in the back yard. He finds out his eye came from a recently executed serial killer, and just as it nearly takes over and causes him to murder his wife, she waves a Bible at him and he stabs his malicious orb out with a pair of garden shears. This is the segment I have the hardest time with. Yes, even more so than the alien hair eating Stacy Keach’s brain. If they’d just stuck with the eye making him have visions, I could accept it, but why does it start to control his personality? I doubt the serial killer’s angry ghost would choose to take up residence in the right eye, of all body parts, and unless you’re going to make the argument that the killer was so vile that every one of his cells was filled with evil that could leech into another person, I just don’t buy it. At least you can explain “Hair” away by the aliens just not being very good at planning.

It’s really too bad, because Mark Hamill’s performance as the haunted ball player is easily the best in the whole thing. He even changes his voice and develops a Southern accent when the killer’s spirit is in control of him. It’s a damn shame that he isn’t used more often. Sure, he’s a successful voice actor, but he’s really good in front of the camera too. It’s just that damn stigma of Luke Skywalker haunting him, although since Star Wars, he never looked like Luke Skywalker again. Part of that may have been intentional, to avoid being stereotyped, but it’s like he aged into a totally different person. Not to say he aged badly - he looks fine, he just looks very different, too.

I dug Body Bags, and I really wish Showtime had given Carpenter a chance to run with the idea and see what he could come up with. Of course, in the thirteen-year span between then and “Masters of Horror”, some other legendary directors have seen their popularity and influence grow in the states to the point that they are well-known enough to add to a popular cable show. Thirteen years ago, you probably wouldn’t have seen episodes of an American cable show directed by Dario Argento and Takashi Miike. Still and all, I’d like to think there’s room enough in the world for both shows to have existed, but we’ll never know. And now that Showtime has dropped “Masters of Horror”, which has been picked up by NBC (woohoo, a horror show with no nudity or gore, that’s gonna be exciting!) and changed to “Fear Itself”, we’re probably going to lose that as well. It was good while it lasted, and we’ll always have the DVD’s.