The F*cking Black Sheep: Dr. Giggles (1992)

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

THE BLACK SHEEP is an ongoing column featuring different takes on films that either the writer HATED, but that the majority of film fans LOVED, or that the writer LOVED, but that most others LOATH. We’re hoping this column will promote constructive and geek fueled discussion. Dig in!

DR. GIGGLES (1992)

DIRECTED BY MANNY COTO

Hell yeah mother*ckers of Moorehigh, get ready to take your medicine. The Doctor is in!

Here’s an embarrassing tale I don’t think I’ve ever shared publicly. When I was about nine or ten years old, my friends and I copped a VHS copy of DR. GIGGLES and popped it into the old VCR. You know what happened? Yeah, we made it all of five minutes into the film before the titular surgeon scared the ever-loving piss out of us with his hideous weasel-cackle. We straight hightailed it the f*ck out of the room and ran outside to scare up a game of kick the can or some shite. I don’t even recall seeing a single image, that maniacal giggle was enough! I know, I know, weak, wimpy and way too hard to believe. But it’s true.

So cut ahead like three years. Now into the teenage years with a calcified horror-backbone developed in the interim, I revisited DR. GIGGLES and realized it wasn’t much of a horror film at all, but a humorous horror send-up that, while never spilling into full on parody, does poke a ton of fun at the slasher genre. A genre that, by 1992, was a neutered shell of its former self, an utter laughing stock if you will, before Craven and Williamson reinvented the form with SCREAM in 1996. Point is, if ever there was a highly entertaining, self-aware B-level horror movie that people misinterpreted, it’s definitely DR. GIGGLES. Here’s why it’s a F*cking Black Sheep!

The first thing that need be understood about DR. GIGGLES is that it knows exactly what it is and never tries to leave its lane. Director Manny Coto preternaturally gets the tonal balance between sidesplitting humor and head-splitting horror, and uses this understanding with great aplomb. Also, as in the best of B-movies, the action begins immediately with no boring setups or confusing flashbacks, back-stories and the like. We instantly witness Dr. Evan Rendell (the late great Larry Drake) and his wicked ways as he lops off a pair of arms and dementedly giggles his way through a hospital. Drake is reveling in the absurdity here, and as a back-to-back Emmy winner in 1988-89 for his work on L.A. Law, really sells the material with the pitch-perfect level of screwball, slapstick campiness. He’s sill, scary, sadistic, and slays and slaughters up there with the best of the halcyon-day slasher villains.

Plot-wise, nothing terribly is new here. Giggles returns to his hometown of Moorehigh, where his equally deranged father perished, and begins an indiscriminant slaughter-spree. Where this movie gets highly overlooked is in its body count, as the good doc will proceed to stack a cool 17 corpses before his hour and a half of fame is over. Granted, most are entirely bloodless until the aftermath is shown, but that’s because the original had to be severely cut to ensure an R-rating from the MPAA. Of course, using medical instruments as lethal weapons is a brilliant idea. Giggles draws buckets of blood with needles, scalpels, thermometers, razors, sharpened pipettes, stomach pumps, stitching shears, the old knee-hammer-rock, and even a goddamn blood-pressure pump! However, the best three weapons Dr. Giggles rocks are the ones that end up taking his own life in the end – a stainless-steel trio of exotic multipronged blades, drills, nails and daggers. Love that shite!

These death tools, while certainly brutal, are used to comic effect in ways that keeps the movie highly amusing. The dialogue in the film is particularly droll, with the doc spouting waggish one-liners that pertain to his morbid profession. When he pumps homegirl’s bodily fluids from her mouth, for example, he laments the procedure with, “I know, it sucks!” Or how about when a hero busts in to save the day, to which Giggles quips “You don’t have an appointment. Here have a heart” as he throws a freshly cutout heart at the dude. Giggles has a Freddy meets Chucky meets the Crypt Keeper sense of humor to go along with his intense marauding violence, which makes the entire film register as one silly-stupid good time. Knowingly, not unintentionally as many have misconstrued it as, which is the BIG difference. The best line though? “Here, take two and call me in the morning” as our final girl Jennifer (Hollie Marie Combs, who beat out Jennifer Aniston and Ashley Judd) shoves two of Giggle’s gnarly weapons straight through his naval and chest cavity. As she also notes, Jen gives Giggles a justified dose of his own murderous medicine!

Yet while it consciously favors the humor over the horror, there’s at least one genuinely unnerving scene in the film. The one that always gets me is the one in which Giggles flashes back to his time as a child. After his father kills his mother, the only way the sick bastard can think of to get his son out of the house is to sew him up inside his mother’s fetid corpse, as if in a womb, and sneak him out that way. Disturbing enough thought on its own right, but then we see the image of a preteen Giggles, smirking maniacally, as he slits his way out of his mother’s innards with a long-blade. She in effect gives a C-section birth to a grown boy who performs the procedure himself. Shite’s f*cking insane! It’s the one scene in the film that transcends its comedic bent and teeters over into full blown horror (note the use of shadows on the wall).

We could drone on ad nauseam about why DR. GIGGLES is a F*cking Black Sheep of a horror flick, but it isn’t necessary. The main reason the flick has been so castigated over the years is due to basic intent. It seems most people think Coto accidentally made a bad movie with every intent of making a good one instead. This is simply not the case. The movie was clearly designed, from the onset, to be a tongue-in-cheek quasi-parody of the slasher rash that proliferated during the decade prior. It’s a cleverly self-reflexive film in that regard, and while it does serve up a high body count and concomitant gore in homage to said slashers, it never does so in a way that fully outweighs the abject silliness of the title character and his quirky peccadilloes. This was always meant to be a b-movie bastion of high-camp and low-kitsch. It’ll scare the nine year old you and then make then your 13-year-old self giggle as heartily as the mad Dr. himself!

GET DR. GIGGLES ON DVD HERE