Bounding Into Halloween, Night 6: “90s Week” Starts With ‘Dr. Giggles’ & ‘The Dentist’ Making House Calls
Many horror fans wrinkle their snobby noses at the 1990s, and it would be dishonest to pretend that their disdain for that ‘dry’ decade is not without some justification. Slashers had become a parody of themselves, and the iconic mass murderers from the 80s had been reduced to joking buffoons for mass merchandising appeal.
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The cultural paradigm had shifted, and people were too busy reveling in cheap, store-bought nihilism to indulge in fear fiction. Still, the genre managed to endure through a handful of diamonds in the rough. This week will be a salute to the few good flicks that helped carry horror through that desolate decade.
Put on your baggiest pair of JNCO jeans and a few sprays of Cool Water cologne. Because we’re about to get jiggy with it…
Dr. Giggles (1992)
The first 90s feature of the week takes us to the office of Evan Rendell, Jr. (Nick Joseph Mastrandrea) in the year 1957. He’s the son of a doctor who went mad after his wife passed away from a heart condition. Dr. Rendell, Sr., began harvesting the organs from his living patients in an attempt to resurrect her, and his equally crazy son becomes his assistant.
Naturally, the simple townsfolk of Moorehigh don’t take too kindly to mass-murdering medical practitioners. They make an unscheduled visit, and then drag him out into the street for a good ol’ fashioned public stoning. Evan, Jr., evades capture in one of the coolest Trojan Horse moves ever filmed, but he’s eventually caught and thrown into the loony bin.
Thirty-five years pass, and the former assistant has appointed himself as a doctor (Larry Drake). His creepy, high-pitched laughter has earned him the nickname “Dr. Giggles” by the institution’s staff, but nobody is laughing when he escapes one night and kills everyone who gets in his way. Returning to his hometown, he gets to work on his massive backlog of patients who are in desperate need of a physical examination.
This is as campy as it gets without going too far over the line. The movie is presented in a slightly comical fashion, but the characters play it straight, and nobody does it better than the late Larry Drake (Darkman, Tales From the Crypt). It’s almost impossible to take him seriously as a protagonist, but he wears the villain role perfectly. A two-issue comic book series was also released the same year through Dark Horse to coincide with the movie, and it’s worth the read.
Dr. Giggles is currently taking appointments on TUBI, but the trailer is here for emergency surgery:
The Dentist (1996)
From veteran horror director Brian Yuzna (Society, Bride of Re-Animator, Beyond Re-Animator) comes the 1996 direct-to-cable cult classic starring Corbin Bernsen (Major League, Tales From the Hood) as Dr. Alan Feinstone, and he’s living the dream. Feinstone is a successful Beverly Hills dentist with a big house, a beautiful wife named Brooke (Linda Hoffman), but also a pathological obsession with cleanliness and proper hygiene.
The dream is shattered when Alan catches her cheating with the bane of every 90s husband who had a daytime job (aka the pool boy) on their wedding anniversary. This betrayal causes Alan Feinstone (D.D.S.) to suffer a psychotic break, and he begins to view the entire world just like his marriage, corrupt and full of decay beneath the surface.
As the line between reality and hallucination begins to blur, he starts taking his personal problems out at his profession with excessive drilling, groping unconscious patients, and murdering nosy assistants. The bloody carnage doesn’t fill the cavity in Dr. Feinstone’s heart that was left by his wife’s infidelity, but at least he’s smiling.
Like many horror movies in the 90s, it premiered on premium cable before getting a video release. There’s way less camp in this feature compared to the previous movie, but the dark humor is a lot more prevalent. There are a few disturbing moments as well that will have anyone dreading their next visit to the orthodontist.
Bernsen is almost too convincing as an unhinged, drill-happy tooth carpenter, and it’s easy to tell that he was enjoying every moment of filming. The performance serves as an example of how he has always been a missed opportunity for any filmmaker looking to cast a psychopathic character.
The Dentist is available to watch on TUBI, and the trailer is below to drill into your psyche:
NEXT: Bounding Into Halloween Night 18: A Return To Lovecraft Country With ‘Re-Animator’ & ‘From Beyond’
