Dr. Giggles
(1992)
Dir. Manny Coto
Written by
Manny Coto and Graeme Whifler
Starring Larry Drake, Holly
Marie Combs, Cliff deYoung, Glenn Quinn
DR. GIGGLES is an absolutely immaculate, textbook-perfect
specimen of the subspecies of horror known as the “gimmick slasher,” with only
one fatal flaw: it premiered in 1992. That was way too late to present
the world with a premise that should, by all rights, have shown up in 1986
along with NEON MANIACS,
THE WRAITH, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, and FRIDAY THE 13th PART VI.* That would be the
right cultural moment for a by-the-book slasher which rests its entire reason
for existence on medical-themed one-liners.
1992 was emphatically
not the right time. The Great American Slasher Wave which had subsumed the
horror genre throughout the 80s following the success of HALLOWEEN in 1978 was
by that time well and truly over, killed off by a mix of oversaturation and
increasingly draconian censorship (witness the milquetoast TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 3’s tortured attempt to secure an R rating, where its 1974 predecessor had landed a
PG), and SCREAM’s bid to reboot the genre with smug self-referential irony was
still four long years away. The landscape had shifted right underneath the slasher’s
feet, and even more than that, the artform of filmmaking had changed. As we
discussed in fellow 90’s refugee slasher THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE,
the 90’s brought with them an epidemic of overlit, drab realism that abandoned
the appealingly ridiculously artificial aesthetic of the 80s, where the genre
had flourished for a decade. This was a disaster for the genre; atmosphere
mostly went out the window with the new visual style, and anything even
remotely approximating naturalism was a miserably uncomfortable fit for the
kind of cheerfully airheaded premise that underpins any gimmick slasher worth
its salt. Acting had changed too; gone were the unselfconsciously broad
stereotypes and enthusiastically bizarre line readings which had so charmed us
during the heady 80’s; by 1992, heroin chic had replaced the cocaine
effusiveness of the previous decade, and the square preppies and multiracial
biker punks gave way to wan pretty boys with perpetually manicured five-o’clock
shadows to communicate their inner torment at having to deal with your fascist
reality, man.
 |
| Also, we wore a lot of denim. Possibly too much. |
You could still throw a
masked killer at a handful of pretty co-eds, of course, and some filmmakers
did. The slasher didn’t completely die off right away, it just gradually got
self-conscious and mopey and corporate. It devolved from the high absurdism of
NEON MANIACS and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME to the unambitious likes of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER or URBAN LEGEND:
slick, responsible slashers made by slick, responsible people who were going to
deliver the expected product on time and under budget, and stay well away from
anything that might surprise or upset anyone. These were, in other words,
slashers made by people self-aware enough to understand the concept of shame,
who consequently thought before they acted in the hopes of avoiding
embarrassment. Some chose to embrace the genre’s inherent corniness and play
into the joke (SCREAM, LEPRECHAUN, BRIDE OF CHUCKY)
while others went the opposite route into the kind of self-serious grimness that
would eventually give us the torture-porn cycle a decade later (STRANGELAND,
RAVENOUS, MUTE WITNESS). Neither school was necessarily a dead end; BRIDE OF
CHUCKY is indisputably charming, and something like CANDYMAN (arising from the
latter school) is close to a masterpiece. But neither embodied the spirit of
the slasher as it had existed in its heyday. For better or worse, the days of
the naive, unselfconscious indie slasher flick were truly over.
Except, not quite,
because here we find DR. GIGGLES existing categorically within its 1992 mileu,
but with at least a toe still firmly planted in the cheerfully moronic splatter
pics of yesteryear. On the surface, it’s all 90s: glossy, clean-looking images
populated by generically pretty white people and their one black friend (Doug
E. Doug, JUNGLE FEVER, COOL RUNNINGS) who will say something wacky and then
quickly die, all acting in some kind of miserable limbo which is certainly not good
but also a long way from the endearing, energetic corniness of their predecessors
from a decade earlier. It’s also frustratingly short on explicit gore, and to
my recollection utterly devoid of nudity. And it is certainly self-aware enough
to realize that its premise is campy enough to make John Waters blush; IMDB
even lists it as a “comedy” (along with “horror” and the far-less defensible
“drama”).
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| You'll never guess what the cops say to Dr. Giggles to elicit this hilarious reaction. |
But get out there it
certainly does; whatever else it may be, it is not the kind of movie to
dissemble around before getting to the point. Said ridiculous premise arrives
right away, immediately, in fact. A medical-themed gimmick slasher it
has set its mind to be, and a medical-themed gimmick slasher it will be
from frame one: It opens with a stentorian quote from Hippocrates, followed by
a an extensive credit sequence of CGI blood cells zipping around veins and
eventually through the heart. In fact, we will actually enter the movie from
the inside of the body, as a scalpel opens the vessels we’ve been so
comfortably occupying, and we peer outside into the placid, psychotic face of
the title character (Larry Drake, “Yahoo #1” in THE KARATE KID and Durant in
DARKMAN, but apparently best known L.A. Law).
We’re quickly treated to
the requisite backstory: It seems that one Dr. Evan Rendell, once a respected
medical practitioner in the sleepy town of Moorehigh, Middle America (heheh),
lost his mind in the 50’s and started stealing patients’ hearts in an
ill-conceived attempt to revive his ailing (read: deceased) wife. Rendell was
killed to death by an angry mob, but, we’re told, his unstable young son and
accomplice, Evan Jr, vanished and was never apprehended. Or, uh, I guess he
actually was apprehended at some later point, because we’re going to begin the
movie proper with his escape from a mental institution, Michael-Myers-style,
and we will follow his progress as he makes a beeline back to his hometown to
pick up where his late father left off.
This is all great news,
because Drake is perfect as the mad doctor who more than earns his titular
nickname (well, the giggling part, at least; he does not graduate medical
school during the course of the movie [spoiler]), giving the character a
magnificent mixture of broad comic strangeness and genuine malice. A good
slasher is going to live or die on the strength of its antagonist, and without
a iconic mask or signature weapon to hide behind, it’s entirely up to Drake’s
performance to create a memorable villain. Fortunately, he more than rises to
the challenge. On this point I must defer to the words of my colleague Mr. Majestyk, who sums it up so perfectly that I consider his take definitive:
Every single word of dialogue
he speaks is a medical-themed one-liner ("I'm not really seeing patients
yet, but for you, I'll make an exception," "Visiting hours are
over," "Open up and say ah," etc.) but somehow, they all seem to
come from within the character. They don't make him seem like a slumming
character actor; they make him seem like a total fucking nutcase who has his
own separate reality running in his head at all times. His façade never breaks
down. He never gets angry or threatens to rip somebody's lungs out. He
maintains his bedside manner and soft-spoken bemusement at all times, even when
he's chasing somebody around with a hypodermic needle or fencing with one of
those rubber hammers they use to test reflexes. But at the same time, there's
an undercurrent of gleeful sadism bubbling just below the surface, as if, deep
down, he knows this doctor persona he's concocted is all for show.
Drake, then, is perfect, but you will perhaps not be
surprised to hear that his victims will be of a decidedly less enchanting
stratum. Our protagonist (Holly Marie Combs, Charmed, “cameo” in OCEAN’S
11?), for example, is a real bummer, spending most of her time before becoming
a victim throwing temper tantrums at her dad for dating again following her
mom’s death, and moping over her own impending heart operation. In my untrained
medical opinion, she doesn’t really help matters in the latter regard by
throwing her heart monitor into a fish tank and drinking a bottle of wine
against her doctor's instructions (her real doctor, the non-giggling kind). The
movie seems to think her stepmom is a monster for daring to suggest that maybe
she’s being a bit of a drama queen, but man, the evidence sure seems to back
her up. Granted, everybody was like this all the time in the 90’s, we were all
insufferable crybabies, that was just what cool people did back then, for
whatever reason, and I swear to you it seemed very chic at the time. Her
boyfriend (Glenn Quinn, Roseanne, Angel), on the other hand, listens to
this tormented soul pour her heart out to him about her anxiety over her
serious medical condition and how it relates to her mom’s untimely death just a
short time ago, and then hooks up with another chick almost immediately after
he’s out of her sight, unable to resist the lure of a sexy saxophone lesson at
a party in the school music room at the county fair (?). And he’s the hero!
These kids really deserve each other. But at least you’re not going to be too
torn up about watching them get killed off.
In fact, while both the leads are unappealing deadwood of
Brobdingnagian proportions, they’re nowhere near the worst offender here. That
honor goes to this other dude (Darin Heames, PCU), and we need to discuss his
journey. We first encounter him hilariously (?) trapping two friends in an
abandoned house with no means of escape and never going back for them (and yes,
they’re the movie’s only two black people), but his real moment to shine
arrives later. Still basking in the afterglow of this urbanely puckish jape,
this prince of a man prepares to draw another productive day to a conclusion by
fucking his girlfriend (probably Deborah Tucker, DON’T TELL MOM THE
BABYSITTER’S DEAD) in his parents’ bed. No one seems to think it is at all
weird when he asks his consort to dress in his mom’s lingerie (which, uh, fits
her), and everything seems to be going smoothly until his date offers him a
condom and he looks confused and asks “where did you get that?” as if it’s some
kind of mysterious alien artifact. Once he’s acquainted himself with the
concept, he then immediately runs to the bathroom to apply it (even though they
haven’t so much as kissed yet!) as though this is going to be some kind of
elaborate operation which will require his full concentration. And then when he
finally hops in bed to make use of the condom in question (which, in point of
fact, he has somehow failed to correctly apply and has now lost, speculating
“maybe she won’t notice?” like a real gentleman), he takes his shirt off and
puts his baseball cap back on. What I’m saying is, this has to be one of
the most deserved deaths in all of slasherdom.***
Predictably, as our
heroine is being stalked by a murderous psychopath leaving a trail of bodies,
no authority figure is even remotely interested in following up with her, nor
does anyone seem interested in the fact that, for example, there’s a murdered
body with a giant band-aid over the face stuck back there in the hall of
mirrors, which both Girl and Boyfriend saw, and Giggles has made no effort to
hide. And also, a veteran cop (Richard Bradford, THE UNTOUCHABLES) knows
Giggles is loose, tells the whole story about his escape, and then just tells
his partner (Keith Diamond, AWAKENINGS) not to worry about it. Wha? “This sure
is a fucked-up town” the partner says. Yeah, no kidding. How bout we do
worry about it?
The cops’ laissez-faire attitude towards escaped maniacs
turns out to be a less than ideal approach to public safety, as Giggles
methodically euthanizes his way through the local teenage population one by
one. Other than Drake, everybody is giving exactly the kind of bland, mopey
performance you’d expect, so there’s not exactly a ton of tense drama here, but
at least he starts to kill them off in a studiously on-theme manner almost
immediately, and does so consistently throughout the film’s comfortable 96
minutes. There’s actually a pretty impressively high body count, a good number
of them real showstopper gimmick kills (personal favorite: strangling a guy
with a blood-pressure arm band monitor) and he’s got a medical themed one-liner
for allllllllll of them.**** The movie is very invested in its solid
gimmicky kills, of which it boasts an ample supply... but unfortunately not so
much in matching them with over-the-top gore. I very much appreciate a movie
that knows there should be a scene here Dr. Giggles takes someone’s temperature
with a long, pointy thermometer and then rams it through her head, but why
aren’t we allowed to actually see it? It kinda diminishes the impact of some of
his more colorful ideas. Director Manny Coto (STAR KID and a busy TV writing
career) claimed on the Killer POV podcast that the MPAA demanded most of the hoped-for gore be cut in order to secure
that precious R rating, which sounds sadly feasible, but come on dude, have the
artistic integrity to just release it unrated (hopefully the assumed Criterion
director’s cut will add the gore back in and fulfill DR. GIGGLES’ true destiny
to ascend to the highest echelons of schlocky gimmick slashers).
If it is gore you seek, then, DR. GIGGLES will be able to
meet your requirements only at the most modest levels. Fortunately, it makes up
for it by being generally colorful and silly enough to at least distract you
from the distressingly low volume of on-screen bloodletting. And it’s not just
the humans who are willing to go boldly into near-surreal strangeness. Despite
the unappealing 90s aesthetic, we have all kinds of fun visuals in there; a POV
shot from inside a mouth, with Dr. Giggles peering in holding a tongue
depressor, a near-psychedelic house of mirror sequence (that serves no real
purpose, but why not have an Orson Welles homage in DR. GIGGLES?), even
some cartoon lightning electricity and a backlit smokey forest scene lit by
inexplicably sourced blue light to remind us of how much better this would have
looked in 1986. The obvious standout is a flashback sequence which reveals how
a young Giggles managed to escape the mob that killed his father by (SPOILERS)
hiding in his mom’s hollowed-out corpse and carving his way out just in time to
give an unlucky coroner a memorable night on the job. (END SPOILERS) It’s the
kind of thing that takes a subtler sense of tone than you might be willing to
give DR GIGGLES credit for: genuinely kind of shocking and perverse, but also
outrageous enough to keep with the straight-faced silly tone of the movie. Same
with Giggles’ skin-crawling but also kind of funny insistence on giggling
through the pain of a gunshot. There’s a subtle kind of power generated by the
confidence it takes to never outright admit this is comedy; like Dr. Giggles
himself, the movie is at no time not crazy, but it is so unshakable in its
insistence to the contrary that every now and then, it’s actually able to
successfully become the legit horror-slasher it’s been pretending to be.
To wit: Giggles has apparently learned surgery well
enough to successfully remove a bullet and close a wound on himself
(“Physician, heal thyself,” he says), which is no joke considering he’s spent
his whole adult life in a madhouse. Really, this is a pretty inspiring story of
triumph over adversity. Frankly, when he straps the protagonist down in his
secret lair to replace her heart, I was thinking this actually might not be
such a bad idea, as long as he accepts her insurance (alas, we never get a
chance to find out). In retrospect, that probably was not such a feasible
outcome, but both movies and people try and tell you what they are, and the two
DR. GIGGLES --both the movie and the character-- are confident enough in what
they are that even when you know better, it’s hard not to occasionally be
suckered into going along with them. The place they’re going is an extremely
silly one, but not an altogether unpleasant one for those who would be open to
this kind of thing. Could use some more prurient thrills, but we can’t have
everything. Even if the gimmick slasher sub-genre was on life support by 1992,
DR. GIGGLES is good evidence that it wasn’t time to pull the plug quite yet.
Also, in a completely unrelated note, kudus to Washington Post film
critic Richard Harrington for blasting the film’s over-reliance on medical
puns, only to indulge in the exact same vice with equally groan-worthy results.
Look, I’m not made of stone either, OK? But at least I had the integrity to
admit I like the puns.
POSSIBLY IRRELEVANT
POST-SCRIPT:
My notes on the film contain
the cryptic phrase, “Nire if rgarm okease” following the discussion of the
house of mirrors sequence. Usually I can decipher my drunken initial reactions
upon later review, but not this time. Hopefully that wasn’t the key to cracking
this whole movie wide open, but if it was, and you can figure out what the hell
I was trying to say, let me know.
POSSIBLY IRRELEVANT IMDB
TRIVIA:
* I never really thought about this before, but isn’t it weird that the FRIDAY THE 13ths all use "Part" instead of just a number, suggesting they're all part of one vast, rambling saga that spans centuries?
** In fact, it is not the familiar 1978 Robert Palmer recording, but a new version by Bad Company frontman Paul Rodgers.
*** In fact, while the camera doesn’t linger on the fact, the blood evidence strongly suggests that Dr. Giggles has taken the precaution of removing this dude’s dick, which I’m sure is a real loss for the ladies of the world.
**** In fact, even the heroine gets in on the act
at the end (spoilers): “take two and call me in the morning” she says, plunging
two huge knives into her nemesis. Not to be outdone, Giggles turns, looks
directly into the camera, and deadpans “Is there a doctor in the house?” before
expiring.
 |
| Actually, "Major" motion picture might be stretching it. |
CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018
CHECKLIST!
Searching For Bloody
Pictures
TAGLINE
|
If you're from
Moorehigh
and you get sick
fall on your knees and
pray
you die quick.
The slightly annoying
formatting which insists “and pray” should be in the third line instead of
the fourth, smashing the natural poetic meter to hopeless ruin, is, of
course, what appears on the poster.
Also: The Doctor Is
Out… Of His Mind.
And the somewhat more
labored derivative:
Sorry, The Doctor Is
In...Sane.
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TITLE ACCURACY
|
100% accurate.
|
LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
Nope
|
SEQUEL?
|
None. The 90’s was a
pretty bleak time for horror sequels, compared to other decades.
|
REMAKE?
|
No
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
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USA
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HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Slasher, Gimmick
Slasher
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SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
None.
|
BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
None
|
NUDITY?
|
The only boobs are on the
corpse that Giggles slices out of.
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SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
None
|
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
No.
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
|
None
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POSSESSION?
|
No
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CREEPY DOLLS?
|
None
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EVIL CULT?
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None
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MADNESS?
|
Oh, certainly
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TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
|
None
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VOYEURISM?
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None
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MORAL OF THE STORY
|
Even if you name your
fictional town “Moorehigh,” some people still won’t get that you’re joking,
and you just have to be OK with that and make great art anyway.
|
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