Dr. Giggles (1992)
Dr. Giggles, a horror film about an escaped mental patient who kills people with medical instruments and cuts out their hearts, is a spectacularly bad affront to plausibility and logical thinking. I’m well aware that movies like this aren’t known for either one of those things. But even then, there’s always the expectation that the filmmakers will at least make an effort. Nothing like that is seen in this movie – certainly not in the way of plot, which is not only thinner than a sheet of paper but also shows shocking disregard for the intelligence of the audience. There’s a fine line between escapism and stupidity, and this movie crosses it.
Consider the opening sequence, in which we see the title character – a.k.a. Evan Rendell (Larry Drake), whose nickname comes from the fact that he regularly bursts into bouts of giggling – performing open-heart surgery on a member of a mental institution’s staff, killing him. This is done in one of those surgical theaters, where a glass ceiling allows an audience to observe. The audience, in this case, are other mental patients Rendell freed. I wasn’t aware that surgical theaters existed in mental institutions, but more to the point, it’s immediately shown that the head of the institution, along with orderlies and even security guards, are all present. So exactly how did Rendell manage to elude all of them, kidnap a staff member, obtain the necessary medical equipment, prepare for unnecessary surgery, and actually perform it? How were the other mental patients freed, and why have they not been rounded up and put back in their cells?
But wait, it gets even better. Immediately after his murderous operation, we see Rendell already at the front gate, where he kills a staff member in a stolen car and steals his security key. In other words, Rendell simply walked out the front door – wearing scrubs, no less. Are we being asked to believe that the guards were so busy searching for Rendell inside the institution that they never once thought to block all exit points? Did anyone think to look at the surveillance footage, which isn’t shown to us or even mentioned but is presumably available, given the fact that it’s a mental institution and all? This has to be the worst staff in this history of staffs.
Rendell drives back to his hometown, breaks into his abandoned childhood home, and pries wooden planks away from a wall in the dank basement, revealing the door to a medical office, specifically his father’s. The father character is not only seen in black-and-white flashback sequences but is also woven into the fabric of the town’s local legend, which won’t be described here in the interest of sparing you the annoyance of hearing something ridiculous. That medical office, we eventually discover, leads to a waiting room, which itself leads to a series of hallways and medical exam rooms. Strange, that what essentially amounts to a mini hospital can be neatly hidden within the walls of a dilapidated house. Stranger still that all the livable areas of the house are dirty, dark, and rotten while the hidden hospital has perfectly functioning work lights and relatively clean floors and walls, save for the occasional dangling cobweb.
The film is in great part a slasher, Rendell going from house to house killing a number of teens – but not before delivering puns and one-liners so obvious and cheesy that even Freddy Krueger would think they were lame. The way Rendell house-hops, you’d think no one in this small town has ever heard of locks, much less actually has them installed in their doors. Anyway, Rendell becomes obsessed with a teenage girl (Holly Marie Combs) when he catches wind of the fact that she has a heart condition and may need a valve transplant. It obviously has nothing to do with Rendell caring for her as a person; it’s merely an excuse for the filmmakers to continue wallowing in their need to make the film gory and inane.
Larry Drake is a decent enough actor and, truth be told, an appropriate presence in a horror movie, with his intense eyes and, yes, even his ability to laugh insanely. Imagine what he could have done as Norman Bates – if Norman Bates had been true to Robert Bloch’s original literary vision of middle-aged and overweight. Why is his talent being wasted on movies like Dr. Giggles? It’s a stupid and unimaginative waste of celluloid. The only imagination it has is a thoroughly disgusting, morally bereft, logistically impossible sequence of a young boy cutting himself out from inside the dead body of his mother. From what disturbed Freudian mind did that idea come from?
