Dr. Giggles

Dr. Giggles centers on Evan Rendell, who as a boy watched his father, a small-town doctor, kill patients while trying to find a heart for his sick wife; the townspeople lynched the father for it. Evan grows up in a mental institution, escapes decades later and returns home, where he resumes his father's surgical practices on unwilling locals. When Jennifer, a young woman with a heart condition of her own, and her friends enter the abandoned Rendell house, Evan takes a particular interest in her, seeing his mother's illness in her. The film mixes horror with dark comedy, following Evan as he works through the town's residents while pursuing Jennifer. Larry Drake plays the title character, with Holly Marie Combs as Jennifer, Cliff DeYoung as her father Tom, Glenn Quinn as Max and Richard Bradford and Keith Diamond as police officers.

Manny Coto directed from a screenplay he wrote with Graeme Whifler, producing his second feature after Playroom; Star Kid followed in 1997. Among the production backers were Universal Pictures, Dark Horse Entertainment and Japan's JVC, and the film earned about 8 million dollars worldwide. Larry Drake was already familiar to audiences from the television series L.A. Law, though the facts here concern this film's cast rather than that career.

The film met with limited enthusiasm: on IMDb it holds 5.4 out of 10 from roughly 8,500 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 5.5 from 182 votes, and a critics' rating of 3.7 from 31 reviews places professional opinion below the audience scores. It runs 95 minutes.