Dr. Giggles (1992)

Opening credits are an extremely dated 3D CGI tour through the human circulatory system, with all the quality of a Def Leppard music video. A doctor drills into a corpse and giggles madly, rips off its arms, and uses them to sexually harass a secretary, then slits another coworker's throat.

No backstory needed, Dr. Giggles is a doctor, he giggles, and he has gone mad. Rock'n'roll hair metal (Def Leppard, is that you!?) kicks us over to a high school letting out for the summer, where we are presumably meeting the kids who will soon get Giggled, including Piper from Charmed.

Dr. Giggles flees the asylum where he was actually a patient and goes to his dad's abandoned house to plot revenge. The teenagers go to his dad's abandoned house to tell ghost stories. Dr. Giggles smites a couple of kids with injections of green mystery fluid, and then makes a murderous house call to the neighbor lady. The kids and cops give us backstory and plot connections about Dr. Giggle's heart-stealing murder dad and their own heart valve issues. The children play Dr. Mario with a joystick.

Dr. Giggles walks house to house, killing each person in the neighborhood with a different medical instrument. He finds Piper's heart monitor while feeding a blender to her dad's new girlfriend, has a flashback to the birth of Dr. Giggles, and picks his primary target, who he finds immediately at the county fair and follows her into the very enjoyably lit hall of mirrors.

It moves at a mile-a-minute, and they finish up the boyfriend breakup, the hall of mirrors, the neighborhood chase, the meeting the cops, and the divisive murderer identification argument in just a few minutes.

Piper is sent to the hospital, where the real doctor and the giggle doctor battle one-on-one with scissors and various medical instruments. Piper wimpers uselessly while Giggles slowly strangles the real doctor to death with a blood pressure cuff. Giggles knocks her out, and they squeeze in a Frankenstein's-monster-through-the-foggy-woods shot. Giggles sets her up for an unprofessional heart transplant, but the town cop interrupts.

It's perfectly reasonably acted and directed and choreographed and scored and all, but the combination of throwaway plot and endless near-identical murder gags makes for a tiresome experience. Piper makes the last doctor pun and defeats him with a Ghostbusters proton pack.