Thursday, October 17, 2024

'DR. GIGGLES'..... WHAT TRUMP'S 'CONCEPTS' OF A MEDICAL PLAN WOULD LOOK LIKE.....


Dr. Giggles (1992)   Hard to believe of BQ, but we never got around to this one upon its first release, so there's nothing like finally catching up with a film 32 years later. 

        (To be fair to ourselves, we spent that malignant year toiling for a major video chain which came direct from the depths of hell. The irony - their punishing workload, their terrorizing of employees and their China sweatshop hours left us little time to actually watch movies.....)

        The good doctor Giggles surprised us in a few ways. For 1992, director Manny Coto took to the gore quotient right up to the allowable limit he could get away with for an R rating. (Oh my, how times have changed...) But you can still clearly notice the obvious trimming of excessive splatter.

       A standard mad-slasher-of-teenagers trope is in place....this time it's Evan Rendell (Larry Drake), who blossomed from a psychotic, giggling little boy maniac to a full fledged giggling grown-up loon, newly escaped from the Funny Farm. 

       Drake, a superb, gifted character actor, has a mad-eyed ball here. The giggle seems to come from somewhere deep in his chest, like a ventriloquism feat, and the script supplies him endless doctor jokes as he hacks and stabs his way to a well stacked high body count. ("You think that hurt, wait'll you get my bill...")

       A few other things perked us up.....the inventive main titles, filled with floating red corpuscles,a clever homage to the legendary hall-of-mirrors sequence in Orson Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai".....and who doesn't love a camera angle from inside a victim's mouth just before Doc G performs terminal oral surgery?

       A fun Halloween watch, if you haven't seen it.  3 stars (***.)

        

        

        

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