DIRECTOR
Manny Coto
SCREENWRITERS
Manny
Coto
Graeme Whifler
PRODUCER
Stuart M. Besser
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Robert Draper
MUSIC
Brian May
EDITOR
Debra Neil
CAST
Larry Drake (Doctor Evan Rendell)
Holly Marie Combs (Jennifer Campbell)
Cliff De Young (Tom Campbell)
Glenn Quinn (Max Anderson)
Keith Diamond (Officer Joe Reitz)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 95m
U.S. release: October 23, 1992
Video availability: VHS - DVD
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The
real star of Dr. Giggles is whoever built the surgical
tools that the title villain uses. In his shiny black bag, the
not-so-good doctor (Larry Drake) carries the most hideous medical
instruments imaginable: a long speculum that enters the nostril
and pierces the brain; a pointed thermometer that gets shoved
into a victim's mouth and out the back of his head (thank God
it's not rectal); huge separators that seem designed to crack
open an elephant's ribcage; and the show-stopper, a gleaming
gun of some sort that discharges razor-sharp spikes -- ka-chinngg!
-- and punches holes through flesh and bone. I enjoyed watching
this stuff in action, but I didn't buy it for a minute. To quote
the Joker: Where did he get those wonderful toys? The movie doesn't
tell us; he just seems to ... have them. (I'm especially
curious about how he came by the giant Band-Aid he suffocates
someone with.)
That's just one example of plot malpractice in Dr. Giggles,
which robotically checks off every slasher-film cliché
in the book. Dr. Giggles, you see, suffers from a Childhood Trauma.
His mother died of heart failure; his father, a good doctor,
couldn't save her and steadily went nuts -- killing people and
taking their hearts home to transplant in his wife. Eventually
the locals caught up with him and stoned him to death, but not
before he cut open his wife, stuck his young son inside her stomach,
and ... No, I'd better stop before I make the movie sound interesting.
The boy, understandably twisted, grew up to become Dr. Giggles,
a maniac who thinks he's continuing his dad's "work."
And when he escapes from the asylum and spots a high-school girl
(Holly Marie Combs) who has heart trouble -- just like dear old
Mom! -- he knows he's found the perfect patient.
The script, by Graeme Whifler (with some major revisions by director
Manny Coto), is a pathetic body-count contraption -- 101 Varieties
of Weird Ways to Die. The usual group of stupid teenagers hang
out at a carnival (which has no reason, plotwise, to be in the
film, except that the moviemakers had access to it) and wander
off to be butchered by Dr. Giggles. The killer must also have
a terrific set of skeleton keys in his bag -- he's always waltzing
into locked houses to get at his prey. Giggling nervously (hence
the name), the doctor keeps himself amused by spouting moronic
medical one-liners ("This won't hurt a bit," "Are
you feeling any discomfort?"). "Have a heart,"
he says as he throws a heart at someone (a direct steal from
Dreamscape). The movie falls into a deadening, repetitive
rhythm very fast, with Brian May's score (which sounds like Danny
Elfman Lite) working overtime to make the action seem impressive.
Larry Drake, a hulking, baby-faced character actor who made his
name as the gentle Benny on L.A. Law, can also play vicious
psychos, as anyone who caught him in Darkman can tell
you. As Dr. Giggles, Drake pulls off a neat trick: He convinces
you that this monster actually thinks he's doing noble work.
When he prepares to operate on the girl with the bad ticker,
he really seems to want to heal her, even though he'll probably
end up killing her in the process. Drake has also worked up a
great giggle for the role; he seems raring to give a classic
sick-puppy performance. But the idiotic script won't let him.
He just stalks from house to house murdering people until it's
his turn to die, and we all know a horror-movie villain
can't die just once. No, he keeps popping up with even bigger
weapons. Luckily, he gets killed for real before he can reach
into his bag and pull out, say, a jackhammer.
It's obvious that Dr. Giggles wants to be a cartoonish,
outrageous splatter comedy along the lines of The Re-Animator,
which also got some mileage out of gross mad-lab jokes. But in
outline it's no different from Friday the 13th and its
clones. The numbing familiarity of everything in the film just
makes the cartoonish bits look ridiculous. You could ask, "Well,
what'd you expect from a movie called Dr. Giggles?"
I don't know -- maybe a little fun? |
