Dinner With A Vampire

Dinner With A Vampire (1989)

Dir. Lamberto Bava

Written by Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti, story by Luciano Martino

Starring George Hilton, Riccardo Rossi, Patrizia Pellegrino

It's technically Dinner with A Vampire, but apparently German audiences demand definite articles.

            If there is one immutable and universal iron law of pop art, it is this: when something achieves a certain level of popular success --no matter what the thing originally was, no matter how idiosyncratic the product, or how obviously a fluke the success-- you can count on at least one rich guy to grab the artist responsible and say “make me more like that.” In this case, the inspiration was the financial success of DEMONS and DEMONS 2 in 1985-86 Italy, the rich guys were executive producers Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina of Italian TV production company Reiteitalia, and the lucky recipient of this enthusiastic artistic patronage was DEMONS and DEMONS 2 director Lamberto Bava. The result: from 1987-1989, Bava cranked out four (out of a planned five) made-for-TV horror movies that played on the channel Italia 1. Needless to say, none of them matched the feverish frenzied perfection of DEMONS, none is very well remembered today, and considering Bava The Younger does not exactly have an unimpeachable track record of quality, I was little inclined to doubt that assessment. Little inclined, that is, until I unknowingly watched UNTIL DEATH back in 2016. Obviously it’s no DEMONS, and nothing ever could be or will be again. But I found it a surprisingly solid, well-made little film noire horror riff that managed to entertain me even without any tits, gore, or swears. So I figured, what the heck, might as well tempt fate and see if lightning sometimes does strike twice.

Lightning did not strike twice. But if DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE is monumentally cheesier and crappier than UNTIL DEATH, it is not utterly without merit. In fact, it’s a rare Italian horror movie which seems to be at least marginally self-aware of how batshit it is, leaning into its silliness with a zeal that probably crosses the boarder into intentional parody. Or at least, everything about the script and performances scream campy, tongue-in-cheek fun, and the only thing that holds me back from wholeheartedly believing this was intentional is the simple fact that it would require the director of DEMONS to be self-aware enough to know when a film has gotten ridiculous, and I don’t see how I can square that with reality as I understand it.

            Anyway, DINNER WITH A VAMPIRE will deliver its titular meal eventually, but it starts with a film crew unintentionally resurrecting a vampire and enthusiastically filming the results until he predictably murders them all. This is the first, but not the last touch which could be seen as a bit of meta humor; you can easily imagine Bava himself (dubbed by an American accent, of course) shouting at his cameraman, “don’t miss a thing! This is incredible!” even as his crew gets slaughtered. Tedious backstory now out of the way, we then move on to the euphemistically titled “talent” portion of the movie, where we’re introduced to various young people and future vampiric victims of dubious ability, who are auditioning to be a singer (“well, I’m trying to be. I don’t have a great voice, but I have a good ear!” [??]), an actor (hot take: the romantic words of the immoral bard in Romeo and Juliet don’t sound so hot via the medium of a dubbed Italian woman mumbling the English phonetically), a “dancer” (skipping around vaguely to the rhythm of a pop beat) and… I dunno, some guy who’s really into finger puppets? What, specifically, they are auditioning for doesn’t seem to be an immediate concern for them, so they are dangerously unsuspicious when, after the audition, all four of them get “the call” to a mysterious castle which they all happily assume has need of dancing, singing, acting, and finger puppetry.

And what a castle it is! If ever there was a castle where one was obviously going to have an unexpected Dinner With A Vampire instead of a finger-puppet routine, this is obviously it. “Where’s the headless horseman?” asks one dude, apparently not as familiar with the setting of The Legend Of Sleepy Hallow as he believes himself to be. When the door is answered by a hunchback who appears to have taken Marty Feldman’s YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN role as a challenge to go broader (and I’m not the only one who thought so, since the young guy actually calls him "Marty Feldman" -- guess he’s more up on his Mel Brooks than his Washington Irving), they’re only slightly more surprised than they are when they’re told they can’t meet the promised “director” until… after midnight (this by an assistant with a rather pronounced Transylvanian accent). Soon a old-timey lady with very nicely crimped hair is warning them about an unspecified danger, which they take as an invitation to split up and wander around alone (“where are you going?” “To the bathroom!” “Alone?” “I always go to the bathroom alone!”).

Once the plot is introduced, much running around in a line through the most stunningly beautiful castle I’ve ever seen ensues, and it’s all very silly and could certainly be set to the Benny Hill theme song without losing much in terms of spine-chilling terror. The characters are notable for panicking when there’s no reason to panic (at the start, when they don’t even know there’s any danger, just watching a black and white movie causes one girl to faint!) and then being bizarrely nonchalant once they actually have to face rampaging ghouls. Faced with an obviously real vampire sitting two feet away and monologuing about the torments of immortality, one of his guests can only think to nonchalantly ask, “Well don’t you have a vampires’ union or something?” At an hour and seven minutes, this mental giant solemnly mansplains, “girls, I think we may have to accept the fact that he’s a real vampire,” as if that hadn’t been established forty minutes before.

            Still, it makes its silliness something of a charm, best embodied in the titular vampire who eventually makes an appearance at an elegant dinner where he informs the motley assembled “talent” that they’re actually here for a very unexpected reason (and indeed, one which might be unexpected even to the audience, who doubtless assume our collected protagonists were summoned to be Dinner For A Vampire). The courtly vamp in question is played by Uruguayan actor turned Spaghetti Western star George Hilton (THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH, ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK), camping it up gamely as an ageless supernatural menace bound and determined to have a good time with his unsuspecting guests, and fond of teasing them with phony hints about how to kill him (when they suggest killing him with a cross, he points out that he’s wearing one [“I wear it for good luck!”], and I like the implication that vamps have overcome their old nemesis of garlic and crosses by investing in big corporations which come up with scientific cures).

Hilton cements the movie’s sense of silly, giddy fun, and that tone is sufficient to keep things lively and tolerable, even when technically speaking there’s not a whole lot of whammy going on. The movie, for example, spends a surprising amount of time with our protagonists just watching a black and white film-within-a-film starring a suspiciously familiar vampire. This movie looks quite handsome in black and white and does turn out to be relevant to the events at hand, but somewhat typifies the film’s comically ineffective protagonists, who find it challenging even to successfully watch all the way through a movie. Their complete uselessness is kind of funny, but also makes them somewhat inert narratively, meaning we spend a whole lot of time basically watching them run around screaming. There’s some monsters and chasing and creepy dungeons backlit by an eerie blue light and all that, but it’s a little short on showstopper moments, which gets to be a bit patience-testing even at 92 minutes. Still, if one must watch a bunch of nitwits run around screaming for an hour and a half, one could hardly imagine a more pleasant setting for it. Shot in the Tuscan Sammezzano Castle, which sports 365 rooms each featuring a unique Moorish design, the location itself is such an eye-popping marvel that it almost doesn’t matter what’s happening in the foreground. Even when the movie is corny and kinda uneventful -- which is almost always—it’s never entirely uninteresting because it’s in such a sumptuously imagined palace, lit as elegantly as you would hope from an Italian production.

The juxtaposition of this stunning work of architecture against a dorky Scooby Doo story about a campy vampire film director is, perhaps, a fitting symbol for Italian genre filmmaking as a whole, especially by the late 1980’s: impressive technical artistry backing up a bunch of muddled, schlocky nonsense. Where the best films of this era blended those two things indissolubly (as in the immortal DEMONS), though, this one stratifies them almost entirely, leaving the schlocky stuff a little stranded and too lacking in the goods to stand on its own. But it’s a friendly, goofy enough experience to squeak by on charm and good looks, if only barely. Self-awareness is not the best lens through which to experience Italian genre films, but it’s at least unusual enough that I’ll allow it in a single TV movie that no one could reasonably have much hope for in the first place. Lightning may not have struck twice, but perhaps I was foolish to think myself capable of finding any Italian horror film from the 80s completely worthless. Bring on GRAVEYARD DISTURBANCE and THE OGRE!      

But seriously dawg, look at this fuckin' place!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a literal dinner with a vampire in there, though it’s mostly just exposition. But I guess HALFHEARTEDLY RUNNING AWAY FROM A VAMPIRE wouldn’t be as good a title.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, horror-comedy
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Not specifically horror, but George Hilton is something of an Italian B-movie God, appearing in Westerns, actions movies, and gialli
NUDITY?	One boob appears in the horror movie they watch
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	The vamp turns into one of those adorable 1930s bat puppets, but the poor thing looks like it can barely stay aloft, let alone harm anyone
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Vampire, but the building doesn’t seem to be the problem.
POSSESSION?	Vampiric hypnotism
CREEPY DOLLS?	One girl stumbles onto a prop room with a bunch of weird mannequins, including one with a arm for a head with one eye in the middle. Man, I wanna see THAT movie
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Vamp into bat, Sexy George Hilton into scary vampire Hilton
VOYEURISM?	None, oddly; you’d think this would be a prime opportunity to have the antagonist peeping on his guests while they’re vulnerable, but he’s actually quite the gentleman.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Finger-puppetry as a career won’t get you as far as your High School Career Councilor told you it would.

The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin (2018)

Dir. Armando Iannucci

Written by Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin

Starring Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough, Jason Isaacs, Paddy Considine

Armando Iannucci (IN THE LOOP, Veep) is known for making black comedies which juxtapose the seriousness of real-world politics with the absurd, ignorant behavior of the flim-flamming egotists who are inevitably in charge of everything. But I guess he might as well stop right here, because THE DEATH OF STALIN pushes that formula about as far as it can go and still be considered comedy. Centering around the power struggle following the titular death, the film chronicles the machinations of various self-interested imbeciles bumbling their way towards a leadership role that has the potential to steer the Soviet Union in either a much more humane or a terrifyingly oppressive direction. The “humane direction” is personified by ambitious but essentially benign bureaucrat Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi, I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY, GOWN-UPS 2, THE COBBLER), while its opposite is embodied in the despicable, vicious Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale, previously unknown to me and absolutely tremendous here). Both men are quickly caught up in a mad scramble to secure enough support to put them on top, resulting in a flurry of desperate politicking with their very lives, as well as the country’s future, on the line.

That doesn’t exactly sound like the stuff of big belly laughs, but the comedy comes from the absurd complications which pervade everyday routine in an authoritarian country where one poorly-phrased comment can result in a horrible death. And Iannucci doesn’t shrink away from the inherent grimness of this premise the way a less confident director might. The first scene (which recounts an anecdote from Testimony, the disputed, posthumously published memoirs of composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich), tells us everything we need to know about the world we’re stepping into: a harried radio producer (Paddy Considine, HOT FUZZ) receives a phone call from Stalin himself, requesting a record of the concert he’s just heard on the radio. With mounting terror, the producer discovers that no record has been made. Knowing that disappointing Stalin has the potential to be professionally disastrous and perhaps fatal, the producer frantically corrals the musicians and audience into recreating the exact same concert a second time, in a desperate effort to produce a single record for a single listener. In part, this is a simple comedy of manners, with the producer’s officious panic and the bruised dignity of all involved juxtaposed against the ridiculousness of the request. But the stakes make all the difference; this may feel like an episode of Fawlty Towers, but it’s one where put-upon John Cleese might just be dragged into the street and unceremoniously executed by nonchalant soldiers if he doesn’t pull this off.

Iannucci leans into that pervading feeling of real, tangible danger, and doesn’t blink at following it to its grim conclusion, including some hilarious physical comedy about an execution which may well qualify as one of the darkest jokes I’ve ever seen on-screen. It’s a dangerous gamble for a comedy, but it pays off: rather than resulting in a bleak bit of misery porn, the shocking bluntness of the violence and perversity on display make the comedy all the more potent, galvanizing the deadpan insults with a real livewire suspense. If comedy is all about stakes, this has some of the highest in the history of the genre, and Iannucci and his magnificent cast (which also includes Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor, Andrea Riseborough and an unexpectedly funny Jason Isaacs) are almost miraculously surefooted at manifesting the seriousness of the situation without undercutting the queasy humor. It works so perfectly that it almost seems simple, a trick that only the most carefully constructed and fastidiously orchestrated comedies can ever pull off, making the exquisitely complex look easy and intuitive. Of course, easy is not the same thing as easy to watch; it is a comedy, but it’s a merciless, nihilistic one that might well leave you with a knot in your stomach. Indeed, some critics have argued that the film turns a little too bleak and corrosive in its final minutes. But as much as it might put an end to any giddy, transgressive fun we might be having, it's also the only appropriate way for this particular story to end. That final shot of bitterness eloquently caps off a film which is consistently and thoroughly bitter about humanity, and reminds us that if there is something funny here, the joke is certainly on us.

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Dr. Giggles

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”).

You'll never guess what the cops say to Dr. Giggles to elicit this hilarious reaction.

 And yet, while the look and construction of the movie are resolutely bound to the decade of its birth, there’s a certain stubborn straightforwardness which is all 80s in the best possible way. What, you think the makers of JASON TAKES MANHATTAN were unaware that the series had escalated to well beyond the point of self-parody? They knew. They just didn’t feel the need to point it out to the audience, which they correctly assumed would come to that conclusion on its own, well before Wes Craven provided the cheat sheet for it. DR. GIGGLES knows the joke is funnier if it doesn’t have to be explained. So it just gets out there and presents its ridiculous premise without pretension and without comment, and you’re free to do with that what you’d like. The end credits play over Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor) which should at least retroactively tell you definitively that the filmmakers get it, if nothing else did.**

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.
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
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, Gimmick Slasher
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	The only boobs are on the corpse that Giggles slices out of.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Oh, certainly
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
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.