"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 9/18/02: "The Bagman"
By JOE BOB BRIGGS
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
Maybe YOU can resist a video box showing a fat guy dressed
in a trenchcoat with a Happy-Face burlap bag over his head and an
oversized fedora, wielding a nasty-looking machete, but I
certainly can't. I just had this feeling that "The Bagman" was
not going to be a documentary on grocery-store delivery boys.
It is, in fact, the old "Prom Night" subgenre--or, to use
the technical name, the Anniversary Revenge Slasher. Evil teenage
pranksters pick on the high school misfit, tormenting him in
increasingly cruel ways, then things go horribly wrong and he
ends up with his face boiled off or a deaf mute in the insane
asylum or--in most cases--presumed dead after the heartless "cool
kids" shove him off a cliff. Cut to . . . ten years later, and
the old friends are planning a little reunion get-together--and
guess who shows up?
It's a classic story, and I would say there are at least 20
different versions of it. I'm assuming that the prototype is
"Carrie," although that story telescopes the original crime and
the vengeance into one long night. I think it's better when they
give the p.o.ed geek the canonical ten years to think over just
how he wants his reunion class to suffer their respective
prolonged agonizing deaths.
In this case we've got the usual assortment of 18-year-olds
going on 30, dressed in preppy uniforms and chasing a limping
classmate through the woods while taunting him with cries of
"Freak!" and "Monster!" Eventually the most sadistic of the young
scholars wraps a potato sack around the gimp's head and rams him
face-down into a drainage ditch until he stops flailing, then
pitches his body into a gurgling brook.
Everyone is sworn to silence, of course, and ten years later
Stephanie Beaton--the only student who turned out to be squeamish
about the vow of secrecy--is making the sign of the triple-finned
Watusi monster on her gas range in Seattle with her sculptor
boyfriend. After satisfying herself, she tells him he's nothing
but a lousy "dreamer" and walks out of the relationship, heading
back to the small town where she grew up.
What great timing! The old gang is getting together for a
night of scary movies and graveyard visits--well, except for
Henry, the obligatory Negro, who has become a staggering drunk,
making it that much easier for The Bagman to knock him out, take
him to a dungeon, tie him to a chair, saw off his hand, then bash
his skull in with a meat tenderizer. "Payback has begun," says
Burlap Smiley-Face Man--as though we didn't know that already.
Fortunately for plot economy, all potential Bagman victims
tend to huddle in houses and fail to check the back seats of
their cars before starting the ignition. The Bagman doesn't
appear to care about the order in which he eviscerates members of
the cast, and he even throws in three bonus carvings that have
nothing to do with the original vengeance. Stephanie Beaton is
obviously the Final Girl, so the only question is: Who is the
Bagman really, and what's under the burlap?
I'll never tell. I will say, however, that "The Bagman" may
not be original, but it's the first Anniversary Revenge Slasher
to feature a gratuitous drag-queen seduction comedy-relief
sequence in the third act. And you've GOT to admire THAT.
Okay, let's look at those drive-in totals:
Eight dead bodies. One dead yappy dog. Two breasts. Hand-
sawing. Brain-tenderizing. Machete through the neck. Machete to
the chest. Handicapped abuse. Body-part-grinding. Cleaver
disembowelment. Arrow through the heart. Forcible drowning in the
shallowest body of water in the state of Indiana. Shovel to the
cranium. Machete to the skull. Two arsons. Aardvarking. Multiple
breather phone calls. Gratuitous Dumpster-diving. Gratuitous
rubber snake. Chloroform Fu.Drive-In Academy Award nominations
for Stephanie Beaton, as the whiny ditzy undercover FBI agent who
screams "You killed him, Randy!"; Katrina McCullough, as the
obnoxious prankster little sister; Paul Zanone, as the creepy
detective with arson and murder in his past; Jeff Toth, as the
transvestite with way too much five o'clock shadow; and Ron Ford
as the burn victim beyond the reach of acne medication, otherwise
known as The Bagman.
Two stars. Joe Bob says check it out.
"The Bagman" website: http://stephaniebeaton.com/bagman.htm