Dr. Giggles / Otis Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		2.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

Dr. Giggles / Otis Blu-ray Movie Review

Who's laughing now?

Reviewed by Martin Liebman July 11, 2010

Get ready to take your medicine, moron.

Horror is the name of the game with this two-pack from Warner Brothers, the studio bundling together a pair of misfire and mismatched chillers in Otis and Dr. Giggles. At little more than the price of a single movie, this bundle isn't a bad way to move some product, but on the other hand, Blu-ray fans who have already committed to an Otis purchase -- it was released way back on October 7, 2008 as pretty much the same bare-bones edition included here -- may very well need a dose of laughing gas to plop down the money for Dr. Giggles alone. Otis is a prime example of low-budget potential not reached, while Dr. Giggles is a throwaway Horror movie if there ever was one, the picture a primo example of late 1980s/early 1990s Horror gone terribly stale. Both pictures certainly have their fair share of ills, but neither are bad enough to pass on; they're relatively healthy, just puny and forgettable. Since this two-fer contains almost the exact same Otis released some time ago (see the note in audio for the differences), the remainder of this review -- and the scores above -- apply only to Dr. Giggles; see here for a full review of Otis.

Not funny 'ha ha,' funny 'ah ah.'

A crazed doctor -- known as "Dr. Giggles" -- has managed to escape from the insane asylum. Nobody knows Giggles' real name, but he's a medical prodigy with a penchant for malpractice and an annoying habit of giggling at the most inopportune time. He retreats to an abandoned house that was once home to the town of Moorehigh's physician, Dr. Rendell. When the town learned that Rendell's practice wasn't exactly on the up-and-up, they killed him. Now, Rendell's son -- revealed to be Dr. Giggles -- is back for revenge. His target: pretty much anyone and everyone that gets in his path, including the young Jen (Holly Marie Combs) who's in need of a "routine" procedure to fix a lingering heart problem. Unfortunately, her condition's about to get worse. As her friends are knocked off one by one, Jen must fight for survival against the deranged M.D. and hope that Giggles will suddenly remember the Hippocratic Oath.

Imagine every medical cliché out there -- "physician heal thyself," "take two and call me in the morning," "laughter is the best medicine," and so on and so forth -- and set them up as one-liners preceding or following a kill, and that pretty much sums up Dr. Giggles. It's a movie with a bare minimum plot built around an excuse for a cheap slasher movie, and that's about as good as it gets: an excuse to make lame jokes and splash some unconvincing gore across the screen. The film starts out with a blatantly phony but an alluring, in an odd sort of way, cheap CGI effect of blood cells moving about the inside of a body; it sets a pretty low standard for the movie, a standard from whence it never deviates. Nevertheless, Dr. Giggles proves surprisingly watchable, not in a train wreck sort of way but rather as a fun little diversion. Director Manny Cota -- if his name sounds familiar, he served as a writer and producer on some of the "Star Trek" TV shows -- plays things loose and easy, never taking the material seriously, building a generic atmosphere around some throwaway characters and a B-level plot. Best of all, he's got Larry Drake in the title role; Drake is excellent as the deranged doctor, chewing up every scene and overplaying his character for all its worth. Everything around him is pretty much garbage, but Drake makes Dr. Giggles worth a watch.

There's not much else of note with Dr. Giggles; the movie's absurdly predictable, even down to the soon-to-die character who feigns an injury to scare his girlfriend, only to really be killed moments later. It's not that it really matters, because both of those characters -- and indeed pretty much everyone in the character list beyond Giggles and Jen -- don't really matter; they may as well be cardboard cutouts with some blood packs attached behind them for as well as they're developed. When a movie is called Dr. Giggles, it's tough to criticize it for taking much time away from what the movie is really all about, which entails pretty much nothing other than a crazy doctor running around killing people with random medical equipment and doing so with an annoying laugh in tow. There's nothing scary here, and the gore is tame even if it does linger on some torn-off limbs, cut-open chests, and hearts in a metal bowl. Oh, a little kid cuts his way out of his mother's dead body in one scene, too. None of it's going to make hardcore Horror fans squirm in their seats, but for a few cheap laughs, Dr. Giggles hits the spot.

Dr. Giggles / Otis Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

According to Dr. Giggles' IMDB page, the movie was originally framed at 2.35:1; Warner's Blu-ray chimes in at 1.78:1. Unfortunately, this 1080p image is no great shakes at the full-frame ratio. Crushing blacks are the norm, with sporadic noise, sloppy definition, slight banding, some background blocking, and a generally soft texture all appearing throughout the film. Colors vary between decidedly dull and excessively vibrant, though the picture generally finds a decent enough middle ground between the two extremes. Fine details rarely impress; faces look pasty and smooth, and the transfer doesn't offer much in the way of crisp texturing and sharp details normally associated with the better Blu-ray releases. Still, there's a fair film-like appeal to the image; Dr. Giggles definitely shows its age and budget on Blu-ray, but the end result is only marginally better than an average up-converted image.

Dr. Giggles / Otis Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dr. Giggles tears into Blu-ray with a DTS-HD MA 2.0 lossless soundtrack. For a low budget Horror picture from the early 1990s, it's no surprise to find a limited range and sloppy sound effects that often come across as unbalanced and wanting for greater precision and spacing. Fortunately, a few elements manage to impress; chapter nine delivers some neat echoing effects in a carnival funhouse, and several other scenes manage to scrape together the semblance of a legitimate atmosphere. Generally, though, the source's limitations are immediately recognizable, right down to the paltry dialogue reproduction. This is about as good as Dr. Giggles is probably ever going to get.

Note: The other film in this double feature Blu-ray release, Otis, is absent several language selections found on the standalone release, including English Dolby Digital 5.1 and Spanish and Portuguese Dolby Digital 2.0 sound mixes, as well as Portuguese and Cantonese subtitle options.

Dr. Giggles / Otis Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Like Otis, Dr. Giggles contains no extras.

Dr. Giggles / Otis Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Dr. Giggles comes from an era of Horror where the genre didn't quite seem to know what to do with itself, and the result was a string of mostly lame but generally passable weirdo movies that deviated from the Halloween, Hellraiser, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th 1980s norm and preceded the Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend era of teen-centric pictures. Movies like Shocker, The People Under the Stairs, and Dr. Giggles don't really fit into any of the contemporary sub-genres of Horror movies, and indeed, they feel more like curiosities and experiments more than anything else. No matter; they're all a fun watch in their own way, and Dr. Giggles is no exception. It's a quick and easy little brainless Horror movie that's built around a concept someone probably jotted down while waiting the seemingly endless wait in the doctor's office, but there are much more painful ways to spend 90 minutes. Warner Brothers' dual Blu-ray release of Dr. Giggles and Otis pairs up a couple of movies that aren't really related to one another, but they're both oddball Horror movies that are worth a watch. The A/V presentations on both films leave something to be desired, and the complete absence of extras is disappointing but not surprising. For those that don't already own Otis and don't mind the missing audio and subtitle tracks, this two-packs makes for a pretty good buy. Those that already own Otis will need to decide if a barebones Dr. Giggles is worth the price of admission.