USA, 1992
Review: JA Kerswell
An escapee from a lunatic asylum, convinced he's a doctor, returns to his hometown and begins killing teenagers. DR GIGGLES appeared after the last fumes of the slasher movie boom had already faded. While marketed as a big-screen dark horror-comedy, it isn't funny enough to elicit many laughs, and its thriller elements are largely blunted. It isn’t hard to see why this potential franchise was given a do-not-resuscitate order.
Larry Drake plays Evan Rendell, a forty-something asylum-dwelling John Doe, known for his distinctive giggling and delusions that he is a doctor. He performs open-heart surgery on an unwilling psychiatrist in an operating room complete with a circular viewing platform (I’m sure every asylum has them!) in front of other patients. Continuing with the (ahem) tradition of sensitive portraits of people with mental health issues that the subgenre is so well known for, it even features someone who quite literally licks a window not once but twice. Drake kills a few more medical staff and steals a car after presumably taking driving lessons from a certain Michael Myers.
Rendell returns to his hometown of Moorehigh, where many years ago, his father, a doctor, was killed by the townspeople after he went insane and cut the hearts out of seven people, believing it would cure his ailing wife’s heart failure. Young Evan mysteriously escaped—though the film never explains why the vigilantes would want to harm a seven-year-old boy—and he and his father's murders have become local legends. His return coincides with the high school breaking up for summer, with teen couple Jennifer (CHARMED's Holly Marie Combs) and Max (Glenn Quinn) looking forward to the break. However, Jennifer harbors a secret: she has a heart defect that may require surgery and has been ordered to wear a monitor. She's been told not to get overexcited. An unkind reviewer might suggest she has nothing to worry about.
Rendell retrieves his father’s old medical bag from his family home (the type of dilapidated, tumble-down house only seen in horror movies). As coincidence would have it, four other teenagers break into the house, claiming they’re searching for the missing boy, even though it’s been nearly forty years since he vanished. Two of them play a trick on the others, locking them in a room before running off laughing (which plays to the trope of black characters dying first in slasher movies if you don’t count the asylum deaths, when Dr. Giggles kills them quickly). He also visits a nosy neighbor, played by great character actress Nancy Fish, and continues his predilection for using medical instruments in deadly, ironic ways.
Mopey Jennifer mopes about her dead mom, her hated stepmother (played by Michelle Johnson from WAXWORK (1988)), her cheating boyfriend—but most of all about her dodgy ticker, which means she can’t be like the other girls. This leads her to dump her heart monitor in a fish tank (which, at least, is a change from the usual severed head in a slasher film). However, as Dr. Giggles continues to cut through the teenage population of Moorehigh, he is taken with Jennifer’s plight, which reminds him of his own mother’s. He wants to help her, even if that means performing open-heart surgery …
DR GIGGLES feels like a movie made by committee—and it probably was. Cannibalising bits of other franchises in a clear attempt to create a fresh one means that it never finds its own voice. All rough edges have been smoothed out, leaving something that is simply OK. The slasher elements are there, but it tends to pull its punches, with most kills either offscreen or cut quickly (though there were some MPAA trims). Worse, the film seems to be at war with itself. Larry Drake was convinced to take the role despite his fear of being typecast in horror (after the then-recent DARKMAN (1990)). He was told it would primarily be a comedy, and his performance shows that. The best horror comedies balance laughs with a real sense of menace and a few scares. DR GIGGLES lacks that mainly because its main character is kooky rather than frightening (despite the actor being more than capable of delivering that menace). Drake throws out many medically themed one-liners, such as “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,” so there wouldn't be many left for a sequel if one had been made. By this point, these post-Freddy quips seemed especially tired, and few of them really land. It isn’t all bad, by any means. The film looks great, and its big-budget feel is enhanced by a lush score by Australian composer Brian May. The scenes in the fairground hall of mirrors (seemingly a nod to Orson Welles’ THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1947)) are beautifully shot and display visual flair and a distinctive style, qualities largely missing from much of the rest of the film. As for horror elements, a flashback showing how Rendell escaped the townsfolk’s retribution—his father sewed him inside his dead mother’s corpse, and a horrified cop watches as the young boy bloodily slices his way out with a scalpel—is genuinely macabre. Director Danny Coto’s playfulness behind the camera (he also wrote the final script) suggests the film could have gone gonzo gold if it hadn't been held back by the pressure to conform to what executives believed audiences wanted.
DR GIGGLES was the first genre foray into film for Dark Horse Comics, which co-produced it. Often mistakenly thought to be an adaptation of an existing comic book series (a few tie-in comics were made for the film), it was meant to echo the style of EC Comics' TALES FROM THE CRYPT from the 1950s. That series inspired movies like CREEPSHOW (1982) and the TV show of the same name, which included an adaptation of AND ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE (1989) (with Drake playing the psychotic Santa). The original script was written by Graeme Whifler but was heavily altered to better match successful genre films, leading him to turn it into his own movie, NEIGHBORHOOD (2005).
Released before Halloween in October 1992 by Universal Pictures, it earned only $8.4 million at the box office on a $7 million budget and failed to attract enough home-video interest, ending any plans for a sequel. Although a seemingly bloody ending for the character seemed to suggest it couldn’t happen, one critic noted, it appeared more like a dream sequence that could leave the door open; it was, ultimately, the underwhelming returns that killed Dr. Giggles for good.
Genre-friendly critic Kevin Thomas, in the Los Angeles Times, loved the film, saying it was a “frequently hilarious collision of gore and gags, and a tour de force of smart, sophisticated exploitation filmmaking.” The Miami Herald called it a “salute to the 'old-fashioned' slasher formula.” However, Bob Campbell of the Newhouse News Service outrageously described it as “Silence of the Lambs for idiots.” Also, George Meyer, in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, called DR GIGGLES“no laughing matter,” adding, “Even the most jaded, undemanding fans of teen slasher-horror films deserve better.”
DR GIGGLES isn’t bad, but for medical comic book-style horror, Brian Yunza did it much better a few years later with THE DENTIST (1996).
BODY COUNT 18:
Female 7 / Male 11
DR GIGGLES (1992) trailer
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