Dr. Giggles

This time, we have a classic from the early 1990's, Dr. Giggles. It's a pretty vicious movie, and I was always amazed that they never did a sequel or follow-up of any kind. Anyway, get ready for SPOILERS, and let's watch this one together...

The movie begins with a pretty nifty credit sequence following various blood cells through a body. It's similar to the same opening credits for Jason X....anyone out there know if any other slasher films do something like this in the opening?

Anyway, there's a muffled voice speaking as we travel through someones bloodstream, and then an incision reveals Dr. Giggles looking into a man's open chest. He's describing what he's doing as he performs his "surgery", and the patient is revealed to be a corpse in a suit, who was apparently killed so that Dr. Giggles could "perform" surgery. Pretty demented, right off the bat. He goes on to point out that the patient just died from a heart attack.

Some real doctors show up, revealing that Dr. Giggles is a genius, but also a maniac. By the time they find the body he cut open, Dr. Giggles has already moved on. He has, in fact, moved to the lobby, where he sneaks up behind a pretty nurse/receptionist to rub her shoulders. She thinks that he's the dead man, Dr. Phillips, until she turns and sees that Dr. Giggles was using the severed arms of the doctor to massage her. She screams, he giggles, and the whole thing goes out over the PA system.

The real doctors prepare to leave the surgical area, but they hear more giggling. It turns out that Dr. Giggles released all of the patients, and several are watching from the observation deck above the surgery. As the staff reacts in horror, the loony patients laugh even louder at them.

Then Dr. Giggles turns on the microphone for the intercom system. He announces in a soft voice that "laughter is the best medicine". then we see a doctor leaving the facility. He takes out his employee card to swipe it at the electronic security gate, but Dr. Giggles grabs his arm from outside of the car. He then swipes the card with a bloodstained glove on his hand, and there's no sign of the doctor he stole the card and the car from.

A map shows him heading to a town called Moorehigh. Then we see the town itself, which looks like something out a film from 1950. Teens are swarming out of the local high school, including 2 of our main characters, Jennifer Campbell and Max Anderson. She's played by the rather fetching Holly Marie Combs(best known as one of the sisters on Charmed), and he's portrayed by the late Glenn Quinn, who we watched in that RSVP movie a while back.

They kiss, and Max tells Jen that she landed a job for the summer at the local paper. When they lock lips again, their friends show up to discuss a summer party they're all going to attend. There's another familiar face in the cast now....Doug E. Doug, a pretty funny actor who has been in numerous sitcoms and films. He was the only thing I enjoyed in Billy Cosby's last sitcom, the guy just makes me laugh.

As they leave school grounds, Max swoops in for a kiss, but Jen gives him an abrupt brush-off, leaving him looking hurt and confused. Then Jen goes to an appointment with her doctor. Jen apparently has a heart condition, but the doctor tells her not to worry too much about it.

Then we see a decrepit old house, washed out and grey. Inside, Dr. Giggles breaks down a wall with either a lug wrench or a crowbar, revealing that the wall was built to hide a doctor's office. Strange....

Jen walks home, and glances up at the old house Dr. Giggles is in. She walks a little bit faster, then hears Dr. Giggles hammering away at the walls inside the house. The distraction nearly makes her collide with her nasty neighbor Mrs. Henderson, and her small dog, Cheap Jump-Scare.

Mrs. Henderson starts to get nosy, asking Jen about the little heart monitor she has looped into her jeans, asking if it's a radio. Jen decides to be vague, and continues to walk home. Mrs. Henderson makes face, and I swear that she looks like one of the guys from The Kids In The Hall, playing one of their drag characters. Yeesh. She's the gorilla my dreams, I know that much!

Finally arriving at her house, Jen tells her father about her appointment, and her dad tries to assure her that her eventual heart surgery will work out fine. We also learn that her mother died, and she hates her stepmother. Gee, that's original. If I had to drink a beer while watching every movie made to see if anyone LIKES their stepmother, I'd be sober as Hell.

Back at Casa de Giggles, our maniac enters the now-revealed office. It was his father's office, a Dr. Evan Rendell. Okay, wait, I'm pausing the movie for a sec...So Dr. Giggles is the son of a doctor Rendell, right? And the shrinks at the facility where he was staying knew about the father....sooooo, why don't they know Dr. Giggles by his real name at the beginning? I mean, sure, maybe for some reason his first name was some kind of mystery, but just call him Mr. Rendell or something. I hate mistakes like that in movies, it's just sloppy writing that would have taken 2 minutes to rewrite.

Rendell finds a picture of his father in a lab coat and carrying a medical bag. That takes us to a flashback, showing the elder Rendell coming home from work one day. He kisses his wife, who whispers to him that their son is in the den.

In the den, Dr. Giggles(Boy Giggles?) has set up a make-believe doctor's office, complete with a crudely made plaque bearing his name and a teddy bear being cut open. As bizarre as this movie is, it's also a frickin' riot-and-a-half. When the boy sees his father standing in the doorway, he rushes over to him and announces that he wants to grow up to be a doctor too. Then, as they leave the den, the camera pans around the room, revealing that the kid has cut open at least 10-15 other stuffed animals, and then sewn them up again. This kid should have been cast as Pugsley in those Addams Family movies.

As the flashback ends, Rendell wipes tears out of his eyes, and promises to get revenge on the townspeople for what they did to the elder Rendell. I hope they eventually tells us what that was.

The happy teens pull up at the Rendell house, planning to have their party inside. Boy, that sounds like a great idea! The party consists of the Doug E. Doug character, Trotter; a drunk party animal named Stu; Leigh, Trotters's girlfriend, and Dianne, Stu's girlfriend. No sign of Jen or Max yet, which seems kind of weird.

So then Trotter starts to tell the story of Dr. Giggles. His dad, who we already saw was a local physician, apparently used a lot of unorthodox and deadly treatments on his patients. After numerous deaths, the town formed a lynch mob, Freddy Krueger-style, and stoned the doctor to death outside his home. The story ends with Trotter claiming that no one ever found his son, which again seems like bad writing. I mean, SOMEONE must have been able to connect the dots between a maniacal doctor's missing son, and the new asylum patient with a violent streak and delusions of being a doctor, right? And again, how do a bunch of local kids know that Dr. Giggles is actually named Evan, if the doctors at the mental hospital couldn't figure it out?

Anyway, Stu begins rapping on the walls, telling the others that Rendell had secret rooms and passages built throughout the house. As he gets Trotter and Leigh to help him find the hollow wall, both Stu and Dianne sneak out to the jeep, after locking the other couple inside the old house. Nice, they just left their friends to die. Jerks.

Trotter injures his shoulder trying to break down the door, and Leigh accuses him of pulling some kind of prank on her. Shen then suggests that if he can get them out, she might have sex with him later. Yeah, right. Get it in writing, Trotter.

When we next see Dr. Giggles, he has on a suit and a lab coat, To complete the look, Giggles also finds his father's pocketwatch and medical bag.He admires himself in the mirror, then promises to make the townsfolk of Moorehigh pay for killing dear ol' dad.

In the dark, Trotter and Leigh hear Dr. Giggles moving from room to room, but assume that Stu must have returned. They call out Stu's name, but when the doctor lets out his trademark giggle, they realize that he isn't Stu. Duh.

They see someone standing right outside the door, so Trotter walks up to the door, and looks through a small opening in it. Trotter then screams, and puts his hands over his eyes, When Leigh rushes over to help him, he shows her that he's fine...it was just a dumb prank.

Well, Leigh didn't find it funny, and neither did Dr. Giggles. The killer pushes a long needle through the keyhole, and injects Trotter with some kind of poison. As Leigh accuses him of playing another prank, Trotter coughs up blood and keels over.

The Doctor then enters the room, and draws another syringe of the stuff he injected into Trotter. The sound of Leigh screaming draws the attention of Mrs. Henderson and her attack poodle. She decides to take the dog for a walk, and marches right up to Rendell's front door. You go, man-girl!

She tries yelling at the front door, which achieves nothing, then attempts to look through a boarded-up window to no avail. As Mrs. Henderson turns to leave, she hears someone in the house giggling. I can't imagine who it might be.

She turns back to the house, and freaks out when she sees someone staring at her through a small peephole in the door. She runs away, dragging the dog with her. Dr. Giggles watches her leave, and does nothing but say, "Hmmm...)

The next scene shows us a carnival in full swing. The camera backs up, revealing that the carnival is a ways off, and that a group of teens are parked in what I assume is probably a popular spot for making out. This is where Max and Jen have been all night, swapping spit. As Jen scolds Max about drinking, the local cops arrive to break up the party. Officers MacGruder and Reitz watch and laugh as all of the cars peel away in 90 different directions.

As the cops head out on patrol again, they get a call about a disturbance at Mrs. Henderson's house. MacGruder tells Reitz that most of the 911 calls they get come from her. For her part, Mrs.(Why the "Mrs."? She clearly lives alone....unless she married her dog.)Henderson is in her bathroom, preparing to go to bed. she gets a sleeping pill and a glass of water ready, but hears that damned dog barking again, and decides to check out the commotion first.

After letting the dog into the house, Mrs. Henderson returns to her pill in the bathroom. She doesn't notice it, but the pill changed from a red one to a green one. You would think she'd notice something like that.

She swallows the pill, and jumps into bed, where her throat closes up. As Mrs. Henderson is gasping for air, she falls to the floor and calls 911. She meets Dr. Giggles, who sticks a tongue depressor into her mouth, then shoves a long probe up her nose and into her brain. It pretty much kills her in an instant.

MacGruder and Reitz pull up to the Henderson house, and cautiously walk through the front door. MacGruder tells Reiz the rest of the story about the Rendell family. It seems that the elder Dr. Rendell had a wife with a heart condition. His murder victims were all young women, in the hope of discovering a way to replace his wife's ticker with a healthier one.

The two cops split up, and Reitz fails to hear or see a door just behind him opening up. An old ironing board comes crashing out, giving both men a serious fright. when MacGruder comes running back to the other man's position, they briefly discuss the whereabouts of Evan Rendell Jr., AKA Dr. Giggles, but MacGruder doesn't want to have any in-depth discussion about him.

They approach a staircase, and Reitz claims that he can detect the scent of alcohol. On their way outside, Reitz finds a torn piece of fabric that he thinks is interesting, but MacGruder wants to leave, because he needs to take a whizz.

Back at the carnival, Max convinces Jen to ride the Ferris wheel with him. As they ride, she finally tells him about her heart condition. After Max tells her that he loves her, Jen reveals something else: her mother died in a hospital. Ever since, Jen has had a phobia about hospitals.

After the ride ends, she tells Max that she needs some time by herself. She walks home in the dark, and finds her dad and stepmom screwing like rabbits upstairs. Frustrated, she removes her little cardiac monitor and flings it into a nearby fish tank.

Dr. Giggles approaches her house, but Stu noisily arrives a few houses away, so the killer decides to take him out first. Stu and Dianne sneak past his younger brother, who is in a stupor playing Dr. Mario. A nuke wouldn't distract him.

In his bedroom, Stu hands his girlfriend a slinky negligee. she returns the favor by giving him a condom. As they each start to undress in different rooms, Dr. Giggles walks through the front door, right past Kid Nintendo. Then we get the all-important "dressing up for sex" montage.

Stu drops the condom in the toilet while trying to put it on, and uses someone's toothbrush to fish it out. As he's doing that, Dianne decides to check herself out in a bedroom mirror. She loudly announces that she's ready, but Stu is still busy trying to get the condom. I feel sorry for whoever uses that toothbrush.

Dianne starts to feel cold, so she leaves the bedroom to check the thermostat. As she adjusts it, Dr. Giggles attacks her. He pushes Dianne against the wall, and rams a thermometer down her throat, then calmly wipes his face when her blood sprays on him.

Stu finally gets the condom back, but throws it away after seeing how soggy it is. He then returns the toothbrush to the holder it was in, puts his cap on backwards, and heads back to the bedroom.

The light are out, so Stu climbs right into the bed. Under the blankets, he comes face to face with Dr. Giggles. The killer brings out a scalpel, and Stu screams loud enough to make even his zombie brother take notice. Then we see Stu's corpse in bed, with a spreading red stain on the sheet covering his crotch. As Dr. Giggles passes the kid playing video games again, he pronounces him, "Terminal", then leaves.

Jen is sitting in her living room, looking at old photo albums. She sees pictures of her parents in happier times, then sees a photo of her prom night with Max, and realizes that she shouldn't keep pushing him away. She grabs her jacket and decides to head back to the carnival to speak with him. The second she exits the house, Dr. Giggles enters through another door. Doesn't anyone in this town believe in locking doors?

Jen's father hears the second door, and assumes it to be his daughter coming home. After his new wife makes some catty remarks, he decides to go check on his daughter. He doesn't find her in her room, but he does find the monitor in the fish tank.

Worried that Jen might be in trouble, her dad starts to get dressed. The new wife makes several bitchy comments about Jen, but that only strengthens his resolve to find her. The evil stepmother stomps into the kitchen to eat something fattening.

At the carnival, Max meets up with a couple of girls who are trying to drive a wedge between him and Jen. they mention a party, and Max decides to go with them to check it out. I'll bet nothing goes wrong.

Jen's stepmom takes her bowl of mystery goop to the bedroom, and begins to smear it all over her vanity mirror. Then she sees the medical bag on her bed, and Dr. Giggles grabs her. He gags the surprised woman, then gets his hand on a tube among his medical equipment. it turns out to be a liposuction hose. He removes her gag, then shoves the hose down her throat. After he removes fat from her body, he cranks the suction, and the tube starts filling with blood.

At the "secret" party, Max is showing one of the girls from the carnival how to play a saxophone. After he explains how it all works, he suggests that she give it a try. She apparently has never seen a musical instrument before, because she gives it a blowjob instead. When she does manage to play a note, it sounds like a rooster in a blender. On the plus side, I suddenly want to be a saxophone.

Stupidity must be sexy, because soon Max finds himself kissing this chick. The other girl who was with them glares at the two, then leaves. It's reassuring to know that at least one person in this movie has standards.

Dr. Giggles goes looking around the house, and discovers the waterlogged heart monitor. That leads to a flashback to his childhood, to the day his mother died of heart failure. His dad sat at her deathbed sobbing, then covered his face and began giggling. As his laughter sounds more and more unstable, the young boy joins in. The flashback ends, and Dr. Giggles vows to save Jen's life. So wait, now he's the hero?

Jen wanders around the carnival, until running into the girl who left the party. Seeing her chance to screw her friend over, the girl offers to show Jen where Max is. Jen interrupts the makeout session, and tells him off, before going back to the carnival.

Dr. Giggles is also at the carnival. He examines a picture of Jen, then scans the immediate crowd. Jen appears and looks scared, but it turns out that she spotted her father in the crowd. She quickly runs into a funhouse to hide for a bit. And then Max shows up. anyone else want to pop up at the carnival? Cujo? Waldo? Bigfoot? Yup, one more person showed up, the girl who lured Max to the party. Oh, and I remember her name now: Coreen.

Jen finds herself in a mirror maze. Max calls her name, but she won't respond at first. Coreen sees Max and tries to get his attention, but she crashes into a glass wall, possibly breaking her nose. Dr. Giggles shows up at her side and giggles.

Jen hears Coreen gasp, and tries to locate Max. She finds a door with an arrow on it, and enters a new chamber. The door, which has a revolving mechanism, revolves to a closed position again. As Jen walks away, the door swivels again, revealing the other girl attached to the door with some type of yellow adhesive.

Jen doesn't scream, but she does back away, unaware that the killer is behind her now. Dr. Giggles scares her, then tells her that the tape over Coreen's mouth is "ouchless". Jen is startled enough to stumble into one of the glass walls, and she crashes through it.

As Jen recovers, Dr. Giggles takes out a syringe with a needle the size of a schoolbus. Max comes to the rescue, but he and Jen have a glass wall between them. She runs to get away from the crazy doctor, but the emergency exit she finds won't open.

As Dr. Giggles gets closer, Jen finally manages to force open the exit. She takes off running, then stumbles toward some trees, and falls into a ditch. She seems unconscious at first, but gets up when the killer gets within a few feet of her position.

She finds herself close to the Henderson house, but of course we know that Mrs. Henderson is dead. Jen doesn't know that though, and she wastes valuable seconds knocking and trying to get in. As Dr. Giggles narrows the gap between them, Jen runs into the street, where a police vehicle nearly demolishes her.

At the police HQ, both Max and Jen explain that a maniac dressed as a doctor is after Jen. Nobody believes him except for Reitz, who proposes that the killer is the presumed-dead son of Dr. Rendell. None of the others cops buy his theory, and he gets demoted to desk duty for the time being.

Out in the hall, Reitz confronts MacGruder about not backing him up. Max hears their conversation, and takes in all the details. The 2 cops move the chat to the locker room, where MacGruder pulls out a bottle of liquor and prepares to launch another flashback our way.

The flashback goes back 35 years, to the night after the elder Rendell was found to be a murderer. The angry vigilante group had already murdered Dr. Rendell, and MacGruder was posted in the morgue, to guard the bodies of all of the victims, Rendell included.

Anyway,in the middle of the night, the cop hears a noise coming from the morgue. He grabs a flashlight to check it out, and hears the sound again: giggling. And it's coming from one of the covered bodies.

He removes the sheet over Mrs. Rendell's corpse, and stares in horror when he sees the dead woman's stomach begin to wriggle and swell. A knife bursts through the corpse's torso, then a pair of bloody hands pop out. Rendell Junior sits up, covered in blood. MacGruder fainted, and the boy was gone when he woke up. The boy even cleaned up the blood, and sewed his mother's stomach together again. The old cop tells Reitz that he kept it to himself, because he knew that no one would believe him.

At Jen's house, the chief of police leaves an answering machine message, letting the family know that Jen is in his custody, and not to worry. He leaves his phone number and details in his message, and Dr. Giggles hears it all. Whoops....

Jen's father arrives home, and goes from room to room, trying to find either his wife or daughter. Or both, I guess. He hears the message on the answering machine, then dials the number the chief gave him. While it's ringing, he hears a message from Dr. Giggles, telling him that he's the new family physician, and that he's standing in the kitchen.

When Dad turns around, Dr. Giggles cuts him with a surgical saw, then makes a crack about sending the family his bill. As he prepares to finish off Jen's father, someone comes in through the front door. It's Macgruder, looking for the family. He calls out their names, and eventually discovers the body of Jen's dad in the kitchen.

Dr. Giggles also finds him though, and stabs him from behind. As Macgruder starts to fall over, he manages to shoot the killer before dying, hitting him under the ribs on the left side. Dr. Giggles wavers between crying and giggling, which is kind of awesome to watch. You gotta give this movie credit for one thing, it's pretty damn funny.

At the hospital, Jen's doctor is running a test. He tells her that it takes about 40 minutes, so the scene switches back to Max and Reitz. The cop turns on his computer to see if he can get any other info about Evan Rendell Jr. Max pulls up a chair to watch.

Dr. Giggles finds a quiet area, and decides to perform surgery on himself. He cuts open the wound, picks up something call a retractor, then uses a suction device to clean up the blood. The entire time he's laughing like a loon. He manages to remove the bullet, then sews himself back up again.

Reitz is still searching for information about the killer, then remembers the piece of cloth he found earlier. digging it out of his pocket, he sees a partial name on it, and connects the cloth to a local mental hospital. Then he finds an APB that was issued 2 weeks earlier, about the maniac killing 3 hospital workers. He rushes to follow up this new lead, and tells Max to stay behind. A second after the cop leaves, Max does likewise.

Posing as Jen's dad, Dr. Giggles calls the police station.He gets them to tell him where Jen is, then heads for the hospital. There, Jen is still having the test done. The machine starts to flatline, and Jen panics. The doctor comes in, and tells Jen that they need to operate immediately on her. Then he turns into Dr. Giggles and exposes her heart with a swift slash of his scalpel.

Dream sequence. Jen wakes up screaming and crying, and her doctor tells her that she was just having a nightmare. He checks the results of the test, and Dr. Giggles stabs him in the back. With the reflexes of a panther, Jen jumps off of the table.

Jen's real doctor crawls a short distance, then stabs Dr. Giggles in the leg. Then the 2 men have a wacky duel, using medical equipment instead of swords. Dr. Giggles wins the brief fight, then wraps a blood pressure cuff around the other man's neck. He pumps it up until the real doctor is dead, Jen hurries away while her doctor is being murdered, but Giggles catches the girl and injects her with a sedative.

Reitz enters Jen's home, and finds her dad still alive. He confirms that the attacker was a doctor. Then Reitz calls 911. Good idea.

In an empty operating room, the lunatic prepares Jen for surgery. While he's "examining" her, Reitz comes to the rescue. In record time, the cop manages to find the once-hidden office in the basement. He should be the hero in every slasher flick. Of course, then they'd only be 5 minutes long, but still...

Where was I? Oh yeah, so after Reitz finds the secret office, we see Dr. Giggles take the lid off of a metal pail, revealing it to be containing a fresh human heart. It's the size of a Buick. Seriously, it's like he harvested it from King Kong. Oh wait, it's more than 1, that's why.

Reitz finds a door marked WAITING ROOM, complete with a sign proclaiming "The doctor is in"...which reminds me of something. When this movie came to theatres, there were a couple of variations of the teaser posters. 2 that were the most memorable were "The Doctor Is In...sane!", and "The Doctor Is Out...Of His Mind!". Those always cracked me up.

Anyway, the waiting room is filled with corpses. They all have big, gaping wounds where their hearts were removed, and there's a pretty good sight gag, where Trotter's corpse is holding a magazine open. a joke about the amount of time spent in waiting rooms, I'm sure. Cute. This movie needed more sight gags. The condition of the bodies, as well as the odor, makes Reitz barf. Reitz crosses the room to another door, and finds himself in a mockup of a hospital corridor.

Dr. Giggles shows Jen some contraption his father built, and promises to let her be the first patient to try it out. She doesn't exactly look thrilled by the news. As Reitz continues to open doors as slowly as he possibly can, Dr. Giggles is telling Jen that he needs to stop her heart before he can replace it. Yikes! To add to Jen's terror, his machine begins to throw out a shower of sparks. This could get ugly...

True to his word, the mad doctor electrocutes Jen. Damn. The machine causes the lights to go out, but then they kick back on after a second. Reitz sees the light on in the O.R., and rushes in with his gun drawn. Dr. Giggles tosses one of the spare hearts at the cop, which makes him recoil with disgust. Giggles uses the distraction to short out the lights once again, and makes his escape before they come back on.

Reitz sees a door swiveling, and follows Dr. Giggles. When he finds no sign of the killer, he returns to Jen, and blocks the door the killer used with a heavy shelf. Then he resuscitates Jen while Dr. Giggles declares that he's going to "do what docrors do best", ehich leads to a view of some golf clubs. Hey, another funny gag! Why couldn't the whole movie have been filled with this stuff?

Anyway, Reitz gets Jen breathing again, then tells her that she needs to lie still while he goes to get help. The minute he leaves, Jen sits up and tries to go after him. She distracts the cop, and he nearly has a heart attack himself when Max pops up from out of nowhere.

The trio pass through the waiting room with all of the bodies, and Jen sees Dr. Giggles emerge from a hiding spot. He uses the golf club he selected to give Max a good whack, then takes a swing at Reitz. Fore! As the cop and the doc spar, Jen grabs the gun Reitz dropped, and starts to load bullets into it.

She fires a wild shot, and it hits the door. Dr. Giggles gets the pistol away from her, and she pushes him, making his shot go astray as well. Reitz uses the confusion to get up, then makes the maniac chase him.

Jen goes to Max, and helps him to his feet. they start to climb to the first floor of the house, but the old stairs collapse. Meanwhile, the doctor searches for the cop, and finds him hiding behind a table filled with various bottled chemicals. Dr. Giggles fires a shot that manages to spill some of the bottles on Reitz, then sparks a fire that engulfs the unlucky cop.

Dr. Giggles attacks him, and pushes Reitz up against a stretcher. That seemed to be a good idea, because it put out the fire on the officer's back. Let's hear it for bad aim! Hurray!

As Jen and Max decide to see if they can climb the loose wood from the stairs, Dr. Giggles and Reitz strangle each other. Giggles takes out his little saw and plunges it into the other man's back, until blood starts flowing out of the cop's mouth.

Max has managed to get to the ground floor of the house, and he helps Jen by pulling her up. In typical slasher fashion, Dr. Giggles grabs Jen's feet to try to drag her back down. She manages to kick his hands away, and Max gets her the rest of the way up.

Dr. Giggles runs through his underground lair(which is now an inferno), giggling all the way. there's a not-too-subtle view of some oxygen tanks nearby, and the young couple upstairs escape the house just seconds before it blows up.

Jen is rushed back to the hospital, where she now needs the heart surgery because of all the strain she put on her ticker that night. As she gets prepped for surgery, an ominous-looking stream of blood is seen flowing underneath a nearby door. A nurse sees the blood and decides to investigate, leading her to a dead doctor in the hallway. Dr. Giggles grabs her, presumably to steal her scrubs.

Sure enough, he slowly limps into the operating room. When the surgeon asks who he is, Giggles removes his surgical mask, revealing that his face is covered in blisters and scorch marks. He opens his charred bag, revealing several surgical implements that look like medieval torture devices. He then kills the surgeon with one that shoves several prongs into the man's face.

Jen rips away her oxygen mask, and stumbles out of the room. Didn't we do this already? Did I accidentally rewind the movie to the previous sequence? I guess not. Jen hides in an eqipment room, the sees some heart paddles and gets an idea. She backs away from the door, allowing the killer to enter the room and approach her. She then throws several bottles of alcohol at him, and uses the heart paddles to electrocute Dr. Giggles.

Jen walks away from him like she doesn't have a care in the world, which is how you know he's not dead. I swear, they do this in every damn slasher movie. Whatever happened to rushing to a safe place? It's not exactly shocking when he grabs her ankle.

He somehow manages to stand up, and tells her that he doesn't feel well. She replies by telling him to take 2 and call her in the morning--the "2" being a pair of trident-like blades. In yet another funny bit, Dr. Giggles looks into the camera and gasps, "Is there...a doctor in the house?" Then he keels over. Awesome.

In the next scene, Jen is back in a hospital bed, looking a lot like Neve Campbell in the first Scream. I think I just might have a teensy-weensy crush on Holly Marie Combs now. Her dad is at her bedside, also a patient in the hospital. He makes sure that she's okay, then lets Max have some time alone with her. Hands off, Max! She's mine bubba.

Max sits next to her, and they share a kiss. He makes a crack about how it's a heck of a way to spend the summer,then they kiss again. The heart monitor blips a few times. THE END

Well, in spite of a few lapses in logic, this was very entertaining. There was a ridiculously high body count(17, according to the IMDB website), a good group of actors, impressive gore, and some funny material towards the end. All in all, I'm giving it 4 killer trees out of 5. Now get going on a sequel or two. Or 12.

and what did I learn from Dr. Giggles?

-Contrary to popular opinion, laughter is not the best medicine. Laughter kills, man. Laughter kills.*cue up the NBC "The More You Know" logo*

-Liposuction should never be administered orally. Yuck! Same goes for rectal thermometers.

-Nintendo games are a dangerous threat to suburban families. Beware!

Next up is either Mind Hunters or Uncle Sam. This should be a fun week. See you soon!