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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