Back in the early 90s, my mother would go to the movies on Fridays with her friends. She saw all different types of movies. Comedies, dramas, you name it. The one genre she liked more than any other genre was horror. We talked about horror movies all the time. She was the one who would steer me in the right direction.
Every Friday, my mother and her friends would go see a movie. She went to see all different kinds of horror but she loved the horror movies the most. She and I had a thing. She would go see whatever movie and then come back and tell me about it. One of the movies she liked the most was DR.GIGGLES. I remember her coming home that night and telling me all about the movie. She told me about the whole movie including all the deaths and twists and turns. She told me about the "reverse C-section" (as Joe Bob Briggs would call it.) It sounded so cool.
When the film hit home video, she rented it for me and watched it with me. It was just as she described and more. The film was a pretty standard slasher. There is a doctor, who has escaped from a mental institution and returns home to kill the the townspeople. Of course, there is a group of beautiful "high schoolers" at the center of the film who get picked off in medical profession-y way. A thermometer with a very pointy end gets rammed through a person's head. Someone gets killed with a big bandaid (I think they were killed with the bandaid but we don't see the actual kill. Just the remnants.) Every kill is cleaver even though the MPAA cut the film to shreds in order for the film to get an R-rating.
The film was also way more over the top than what she had described it as. As I mentioned, there are the kills, but there is also the backstory. The backstory is that Dr. Giggles' father, who was also a doctor, killed a bunch of people and took their hearts because he wanted to find a cure for his wife's heart condition. The father was caught but before this would happen, he had to get his kid out of the house. He figured no one would ever believe the person who saw what happened. He was right.
*******I AM GOING TO SPOIL DR. GIGGLES. IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ ABOUT IT, SKIP DOWN TO PAST THE QUOTED WORDS. *******
The veteran cop (Richard Bradford) tells his partner he knows what happened to the doctor's kid. He says all the other cops were busy investigating and searching for the kid. He was left behind to watch over the bodies of the mother and a few others. He is upstairs at his desk when he hears a child giggling. He follows the giggles to the room where the bodies were being stored. He looks around and notices the abdomen of the kid's mother is moving around. He gets closer to the body and the moving gets more and more active. Then a scalpel comes through the upper torso of the mother's corpse and cuts all the way down the middle of her torso. Then two hands come out and spread the cut open to reveal young Doctor Giggles. He had been hidden inside the corpse of his mother and the body was taken to the police station. Pretty clever, huh?
This scene is horrifying. The shot looking down on the corpse and the kid moves around inside of it. The scalpel cutting through the chest cavity from the inside out. Not only do we get a very creepy shot of the kid rising out of his mother's corpse, covered in blood, but there is also a shot of the cop with the shadow of the kid rising up in the background. This scene is brilliantly shot and edited and is the best scene in the film.
This was the scene my mother described to me in vivid detail. I kind of wish she hadn't spoiled this scene for me. I love our Friday night movie talks but I wish she had left this scene for me to discover. I can only imagine what my would have thought seeing that scene for the first time.
*******END SPOILERS*******
I want to mention Larry Drake before I finish up here. To me, Drake was Benny in L.A. LAW. He was so good in that show that he won two Emmys. I remember watching L.A. LAW with my parents every Thursday night. I don't remember the any episodes at all but I do remember the experience. Drake makes the titular doctor his own completely. He doesn't play the character with a wink or a smile (except for one shot) and he never lets you think he is in on the joke. He plays it straight (for the most part. His puns are cleaver and funny, but he doesn't see them that way. He believes what he is saying. Its funny because of how straight it is played. Drake's performance reminded me of Leslie Neilsen in the NAKED GUN films. He plays Frank Drebin completely straight which makes it funny. He isn't going after jokes. He is just a cop who says things that may or may not be funny.
Drake was also Robert G. Durant in Sam Raimi's DARKMAN. This is the film I saw him in first. The character is the complete opposite of Benny, who is a loveable, mentally challenged law clerk. We love Benny. Drake knew this and played Durant as calm and collected but still evil as shit. We love Durant but for all the wrong reasons. Drake was a great actor who died in 2016.
You know, it's a shame DR. GIGGLES didn't do well at the box office. We should have had a bunch of sequels, even if they went straight-to-video. DR. GIGGLES could have been like the LEPRECHAUN series. You get two that played in theaters and then the rest goes to the home video market. I am sure Drake would have proudly been in every one of them. It took people far too long to appreciate DR. GIGGLES but it was after Drake left us so he didn't get to bask in that glory. Hell, had he lived longer, we could have gotten a DR. GIGGLES legacy sequel. That would have been awesome. WATCH. THIS. MOVIE. It is great.
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