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| Images courtesy of Universal Pictures |
Late Cuban born writer-director Manny Coto who recently
passed in July was an Emmy award winning producer with a relatively small
filmography dabbling in horror while his career in television was quite
prolific. Serving as the showrunner and executive
producer of Star Trek: Enterprise and executive producer of four seasons
of 24 before moving onto to American Horror Story, Coto’s
background in the horror slasher as well as work on such shows as Tales from
the Crypt and The Outer Limits cemented the filmmaker as a skillful
if not infrequent purveyor of horror or horror-comedy.
As old as the subgenre itself is the so-called “evil doctor”
horror film involving deranged surgeons committing more than a little medical
malpractice, dating all the way back to James Whale’s 1931 iteration of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein to Jonathan Demme’s more recent 1991 The
Silence of the Lambs. The 1980s
produced a wide variety of these kinds of clinical chillers, the most striking
examples of which go to David Cronenberg’s science-gone-awry shockers The
Fly and Dead Ringers while later fare saw Brian Yuzna get into it
with the Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator and Yuzna’s own The
Dentist. All of this amply paved the
way for something like Manny Coto’s 1992 cult mad doctor favorite Dr.
Giggles.
In an opening Fantastic Voyage inspired prologue in
Moorehigh, 1957, Dr. Evan Rendell (Larry Drake) is shot dead in his own homegrown
hospital after townsfolk and police discover the mad doctor has been cutting
the hearts out of his patients, but not before the doctor’s son sneaks away. Thirty-five years later circa 1992, the
doctor’s son Evan Jr. now an adult played again by Larry Drake massacres his
way out of a mental asylum and finds his way back to his now abandoned
childhood home with dark motives percolating.
Meanwhile the film shifts gears following 19-year-old Jennifer Campbell
(Holly Marie Combs pre-Charmed fame) and her boyfriend Max (Glenn Quinn) and group of friends (stereotypical
horny teens) are planning their summer break.
Unbeknownst to everyone, the snickering sociopathic Dr. Giggles starts
making the rounds through the town killing off residents and eventually picking
off Jennifer’s friends one by one, delivered with snarky one-liners in a wide
variety of gruesome cringeworthy kills.
The first film to come out of a first-look deal with Dark
Horse Comics to develop films based on new or preexisting intellectual
properties which generated a graphic-novel series tie-in with the film’s
release (penned by Coto also), Dr. Giggles is primarily a vehicle for
character actor Larry Drake of Darkman and Dark Night of the Scarecrow
to play a deliciously nutty horror heavy.
Replete with some wild practical effects driven death scenes generated
by the KNB effects team, the film while somewhat concerned with Jennifer and
her family life problems with her father Tom (Cliff DeYoung of Flight of the
Navigator) is mostly eagerly awaiting with baited-breath for the mad doctor
to slay things up and spray crimson everywhere.
The film is a triumph of production design by legendary artist
Bill Malley who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on The
Exorcist and is at times amazing to look at for being generated on such a
tight budget, captured beautifully on film by Halloween 5: The Revenge of
Michael Myers cinematographer Robert Draper. Almost even more overqualified is the film’s
composer Brian May who has done everything from Mad Max and The Road
Warrior to Cloak & Dagger and Freddy’s Dead: The Final
Nightmare, serving up a suitably “tense” horror score with an energy you
can trace back to his work with George Miller.
Released theatrically followed by a much-touted tape and
laserdisc release, the cult favorite more-or-less broke even but was met with
tepid critical reception. Erroneously
the film is often cited as one of the most “unintentionally funny” films ever
made as from start to finish from the moment Larry Drake starts his nutty
nervous giggle you can’t help but giggle with him. Sure its a gory slasher with mad doctor
tropes we’ve seen dozens of times before but it looks and sounds so good with
perhaps one of the most original horror houses in cult cinema history its hard
not to eagerly eat this one up. Pretty
close to creating a wholly original horror icon, Larry Drake and crew are
clearly having a lot of demented fun here and at the end of the day it couldn’t
be a more perfect treat for the month of October horror viewing.
--Andrew Kotwicki
