I believe every medical/doctor related cliche found its way into this movie. Is there a doctor in the house? Take two and call me in the morning. A house call crack. And the list goes on and on and on and on. Dr. Giggles opens with a doctor/slash real mental patient performing a heart removal in front of a host of crazies. Soon he finds his way back to his old town and house, still intact underneath the facade of decay where his father once practiced medicine but some terrible thing happened. Naturally a group of teenagers out to have fun go in the condemned house at just that time. No big surprise what happens. Larry Drake plays the lead role, and although he is working with rubbish really, I thought his obvious zeal for the part was interesting to say the least. Make no mistake here, Dr. Giggles is a routine-routine slasher film from the late seventies/early eighties vein. A sick individual traumatized from something in his past goes back to the scene of the crime so to speak, where he can exact revenge on all those that had something or nothing to do with him and his tragedy. What separates the film for me a bit is that it has a darkly humorous side - we really are not meant to take anything serious at all - and yet is very mean-spirited with the hyperbolic death rate. Roughly 15-20 people are savagely killed on-screen or off. We have death by blood pressure cuff, death by humongous stainless steel surgical instruments, suffocation from a big bandage(?), poisoning, needle injection, some kind of spinning drill that takes a woman's breath away literally, and so on and on and on and on. For me it was just too much callousness. The ending is also more than far-fetched. It is plum ridiculous! As for the rest of the cast, well, certainly this was not a huge stepping stone to great things to come. Holly Marie Combs; however, did a decent job and has faired relatively well. Some familiar faces minus notable names are thrown in as well.
