Review of Bag Man

Two Sentence Horror Stories: Bag Man (2021)
Season 3, Episode 1
5/10
The Breakfast Club Mk. 2
1 February 2021
Warning: Spoilers
"Bag Man" is just a supernatural take on "The Breakfast Club", with five students locked in detention and a kinda-hip teacher/principal monitoring them. Toss in the inexplicable supernatural occurrence of a "Bag Man" in an abandoned bag that is in the classroom, and voila, season 2 of "Two Sentence Horror Stories"

I'm not sure why the series returned, other than the fact that an episode typically involves a small cast and it's probably pandemic proof. That, and maybe host network CW needed something to fill the timeslot and the show is cheap.

There's the typical "woke" element, as Gabbi admits that she likes Zee apropos of nothing. I guess for the benefit of the audience, so we could know that there are non-white lesbians. As I kind of noted, the 11th hour revelation doesn't do anything, plot-wise.

Overall, "Bag Man' is an effective 20 minutes of unrelenting and unexplainable horror. Why is the Bag Man in the bag, and why does it kill people? Who knows? But the episode fails to stick the ending. I can buy an inexplicable monster, but the ending is inexplicable as well. The three surviving students are trapped in the classroom by Bag Man. The principal is trapped in his office, and... that's it. Presumably the students will all lose their heads. But what happens to the principal, Gallo? What happens to Bag Man? I can buy that he's a supernatural beastie that doesn't need an excuse to exist, or kill people. But where does the story go from here? There's no "And the cycle continues", there's no hint of Gallo's fate. The episode just... ends.

Maybe they couldn't do more in the 20 minutes allotted. But that's a reason not to do anything, not to present a vague and incomplete story, that's only enlightened by Bag Man himself. Who is a creepy presence. And the actors playing the students are okay. And veteran Rob Labelle as Gallo doesn't have much to do, but he does it well. It's just a piffle of an episode.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
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