"Dr. Giggles" - it's puntastic!

Here's one that I've been waiting to see for quite a while. "Dr. Giggles" was yet another of those movies that occupied shelf space in The Greatest Video Store Ever. Of course, the video box art scared the ever living crap out of me then; now I've seen this movie, and had I known then what I know now, I would have thought myself quite the moron for being so piss-terrified of watching this flick. It wasn't even an option in 1992. Now? Hell, I was half-asleep the entire time.

To be sure, this movie isn't scary. Not even in the "jump scare" variety. In slight defense of director Manny Coto and the rest of the filmmakers, they clearly weren't aiming for scares anyway; the movie fits more into the "winking at the audience/black humor" subgenre of horror alongside such undisputed classics (/Patrick Bateman) as "Night of the Creeps" and "Return of the Killer Tomatoes." Only this one is nowhere near as good. In terms of viscerality it's decent - there's definitely plenty of opportunities for good splatter from a "psychotic doctor on the loose" plot - but in terms of impact and comedy, it's sub-par.


Meet Dr. Giggles, played by Larry "The Man" Drake. I can't remember where I read it, but someone summed up the career of Mr. Drake perfectly by saying he was the guy that a director hired if they wanted their flick to seem like a big deal and not ACTUALLY have to pay big-actor salary. A notorious "that guy" character actor, you might have seen him as Durant in the first two "Darkman" movies or as Psycho Santa v 2.0 in the awesome "Tales From the Crypt" episode "And All Through the House." Here, he's your star character - an insane, murderous dude obsessed with medicine and with making medical-related quips. Yup. The opening sequence of the movie shows this guy (whose "identity is unknown," according to one of the anciliary characters) brutally gutting two doctors at an asylum before making a daring jettison.

A few more words on those quips - "Dr. Giggles" might feature more bad punny jokes before, during, and after death scenes than the entire "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise combined. Somebody warned me about this going on, but I wasn't prepared for just HOW badly this flick tries to be funny. There is such a thing as trying too hard when it comes to comedy, and "Dr. Giggles" is definitely it. With ONE exception (more on that later), they failed to elicit even a smile from yours truly. While Drake is definitely game for this role (as always), the script definitely didn't do him any favors. I should also point out that he's quite aptly named, and giggles in delight whenever he's inflicting pain or experiencing it himself.

Moving right along, we are quickly taken to the town of Moorehigh and meet our resident cast of annoying college students. Well, mostly. Our heroine in this film is Jennifer Campbell, played by Holly Marie Combs of later "Charmed" and "Pretty Little Liars" fame. Considering the material, she actually makes a fairly resonant and sympathetic "final girl" character, having just lost a mother to a mysterious illness and quite pissed off that her dad is shacking up with somebody else immediately following the mother's death. She has also been diagnosed with a heart condition, and the resulting angst is played fairly well. Definitely the best aspect of this film.

The rest of the characters? Not so much. Her boyfriend Max (Glenn Quinn) and the rest of the disposable cast (including Doug E. Doug - remember him? - and a dude who looks like Pauly Shore's evil twin) don't do much in the way of making me care about/remember them. Mostly because I don't. Since the middle sections of this movie largely consist of Giggles coming back to his hometown and stalking/eliminating these people, there's a large portion of this movie that went in one ear and out the other.

Having said that, there's a few bits here in these middle sections that give us the background of this medical monster. Admittedly, since I was half-asleep I probably didn't absorb it as well as I should have, but apparently Giggles (real name Evan Rendell) is the son of a genuine accredited doctor, and as a child, Giggles and his father went on a murderous rampage killing the father's patients and taking their hearts in an attempt to bring the elder Rendell's dead wife (and by extension Giggles' mother) back to life. In a Freddy Krueger-esque twist, the town eventually got wise to the father-son terror duo and stoned the father to death before Evan Jr. escaped, hence why he's coming back to Moorehigh as an adult. Or something. It probably makes more sense while actually watching the movie.

Anywoo...wrapping up this dog and pony show, after all of the annoying secondary characters are killed off, we get our Final Girl sequence as Giggles kidnaps Jennifer and attempts to replace her "broken" heart with one of the hearts that he took from his recent slew of victims. How many? There are 17 onscreen deaths in this movie. In stark contrast to the rest of this movie, this aspect of the film works quite well, as I was firmly on Jennifer's side and wanted her to survive. This segment also contains the movie's one funny joke, as Giggles, in the act of chasing Jennifer and her boyfriend, looks off-camera and says "Time to do what doctors do best!" before grabbing a golf club. Yeah, I laughed. Even better, the movie ends without a twist, something so rare in horror films that it's almost a twist in and of itself. If only the rest of the movie had been executed this well.

So now it's time for the all-important summary paragraph. Really, what more is there to say? "Dr. Giggles" is a kinda-sorta horror parody that fails miserably for the vast maority of its running time, as it is neither funny nor scary. Having said that, Drake is very game for his role as always, and it's a shame that this guy never got a shot to play a serial killer in a good movie, while Combs manages to mine her character for every bit of emotion that it's worth. However, for a movie about a crazy psycho doctor obsessed with medical puns...I'm having trouble remembering much of it at all a mere 24 hours after witnessing it for the first time. Something has to be said for that.

* 1/2 out of ****. A good final girl and by extension a terrific final girl sequence doesn't make up for the rest of the Batista-esque botching contained within "Dr. Giggles."