January 2025

Dr. Giggles (1992)

“Laughter is the best medicine.”

As played by a thoroughly committed Larry Drake (Benny Stowitz from L.A. Law!), this titular sawbones could have been a contender, worth at least two sequels, minimum.

Dr. Giggles is an early release from Dark Horse Comics, so no reason for there not to be a franchise.

As a child, Evan Rendell Jr. (Drake) watched the angry citizens of Moorehigh haul his father, the town doctor, out of his home office and stone him to death. Apparently, the locals were none-to-pleased with Rendell Senior’s research methods, which included killing seven patients in search of a healthy heart to transplant into his own dying wife.

Hey! You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Young Rendell is institutionalized and grows up into an adult lunatic with a fixation on physicians. He escapes after dissecting his captors, and heads back to Moorehigh tittering like a freshly sprung Michael Myers.

Final Girl Jennifer Campbell (Holly Marie Combs, Piper from Charmed!) is an anxious high school student with heart valve problems set on a collision course with the hysterical healer, while a bunch of her friends and neighbors fall victim to Rendell’s house calls, dying horribly under the madman’s medical ministrations.

A hearty round of applause to Drake, who giggles and puns his way through the slaughter with verve and panache, a maniacal glint in his bulging eyes.

“Wait till you see my bill,” he crows after skewering another unlucky chump with his antique surgical implements.

Like any good doctor, Rendell is torn between his duty to the community (killing them), and carrying on his father’s quest to find a heart, in this case to “save” Jennifer.

The fact that he’s a self-taught surgeon doesn’t inspire much confidence, though. That’s why the patient needs to be strapped to the table—for her own good.

Dr. Giggles is premium slasher carnage punctuated with corny jokes. If it’s wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

The doctor will slay you now.

Trim Season (2023)

Though it has a few decent moments, Trim Season is mostly a harsh toke.

Director Ariel Vida definitely has a gift for visual flair but largely ignores storytelling in favor of making sure that the color red is fully represented in as many shots as possible.

A group of broke stoner girls and one trans man get a good paying gig trimming bud at a pot farm in Northern California.

Nothing wrong with that, I’ve done it myself. The isolation, drugs, little sleep, and sketchy authority figures make it a ripe scenario for any number of horror options.

The trimmers are introduced to Mona (Jane Badler), the mysterious and commanding owner of the operation, and quickly find her to be a firm enforcer of rules as well as their provider of weed and employment.

Emma (Beth Million) is our chief protagonist among the reefer recruits, but like most of the cast, she does little to distinguish herself, leaving Badler to dominate the action, as a sort of hippie Elizabeth Bathory, smoking her own strain of crimson cannabis.

I appreciated Vida’s gender tweaking throughout, as the girls are clearly protective of Dusty (Bex Taylor-Klaus), a vulnerable trans man, who would rather not talk about his past, but has an instant connection with Mona’s shy son, Christopher (Corey Hart).

Trim Season squanders much of its potential, however, thanks to stock characters, a wayward script, and careless plot developments: Why make a point of having Lex (Juliette Kenn De Balinthazy) being impervious to pain if it doesn’t come into play in any meaningful way?

It doesn’t help that when Mistress Mona flexes her witchy powers, she waves her hands in the air, remotely guiding her victims to off themselves like awkward, staggering marionettes. Instead of the intended dread, the results are comical, at best.

Also, note to the art department. The scenes featuring the girls trimming buds around the table are marred by the presence of weird, bulbous styrofoam cannabis. Is that the best we can do?

As I mentioned, this particular plot could have yielded some top-shelf terror. Sadly, Trim Season wouldn’t get a fly high.

In A Violent Nature (2024)

There’s quite a bit more here than meets the eye.

In A Violent Nature is not, as I had been told, a slasher movie told from the killer’s point of view.

Instead, writer-director Chris Nash dials up a multitude of perspectives, as if the doomed campers were being chased through a high-tech forest equipped with dozens of surveillance angles to choose from.

Stupid, soon-to-be-deceased college students rent a cabin in the woods. While hiking they disturb a memorial to Johnny, a mentally challenged boy who got bullied to death 70 years before.

Straight away we witness a now monstrous Johnny rise from the grave to seek revenge, and we spend considerable time riding shotgun alongside this unstoppable fiend as he makes an inspired mess out of the clueless kids.

Sometimes the murders are super gory, (the girl doing yoga gets some major stretching bodywork done) and some happen at a distance in the blink of an eye, as when a comely swimmer disappears below the waterline with a yelp from across the lake.

Nash keeps refreshing the views. He employs a static wilderness cam that dispassionately records long shots of the killer walking from one side of the frame to another. Next thing you know, we’re sitting on his shoulder, then a bird’s eye view, then a worm’s eye view.

With a string of cameras at his disposal, Nash asks us to consider the single-minded plight of a creative mutilator, in this case one that wears an old-time fireman’s mask, giving him the appearance of a predatory insect.

When Johnny occasionally pauses in his gruesome quest, we can get inside his horrible head and watch the wheels turn as he considers how best to maximize his menace, though he does remove his mask to play with a toy car at one point, a tragic reminder that this thing was once a happy child.

The undead death dealer featured in In A Violent Nature isn’t a killing machine, however. He wordlessly seems to enjoy the hunt and clearly takes pride in his victim-stalking and construction of murderous tableaux.

Johnny is obviously an artist, inviting us along to spy on his process. Now there’s a view you won’t see every day.