Summer Fest Supplemental: Evil Laugh

  When one thinks about horror films that classify as "80s Cheese," one considers Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and The Slumber Party Massacre Part 2, which doesn't get much more quintessentially hairspray and lip gloss than a killer with a drill inside his electric guitar. I would like to formally submit 1988's* Evil Laugh to that pantheon of cheesetastic horror films. It fails to do what it sets out to, but is at the same time a must-see for fans of goofy slasher flicks.

 Jerry (Gary Hays) is a doctor engaged to Connie (Kim McKamy, also known as porn star Ashlyn Gere), and the two of them are planning on renovating an abandoned Foster Home - with a horrible secret! - in order to give it a fresh start. Jerry and Connie invite their medical school interns up to the house to help clean it up. There's Barney (Jerold Pearson), the weirdo who's way into horror movies; meatheads Mark (Myles O'Brian)  and Johnny (co-writer and brother of Scott, Stephen Baio), rich jerks Sammy (Tony Griffin) and Betty (Karyn O'Bryan), as well as airhead Tina (Jody Gibson); none of whom seem like they ever have been or will be in the medical profession (just my unqualified opinion, but if these clowns are in Med School, then I'm glad I don't have the insurance to go to their practices). Anyway, a strange killer with a doofy laugh (or is it an EVIL laugh... see what I did there?) is killing off anyone in or around the house, so can this group of unappealing jerks clean up and have some make out time before it's too late for them?

 There's not a single moment in Evil Laugh that works: it's a horror movie that isn't scary, it's a comedy that isn't funny. Every time Dominick Brascia and Steven Baio try to go for scares (or laughs) they fail miserably: the explanation of why the Foster Home was shut down is intercut with some lame comedy involving landlord Mr. Burns (Howard Weiss) and his wife (Susan Grant), as well as the unsexiest bondage scene you'll ever bear witness to. There's a lengthy scene involving Chief Cash (Hal Shafer) and his not-really-Deptuy Freddy (Johnny Venocur) that seems to exist just to add two more victims. They botch a "microwave to the head" kill, fudge a "character that knows horror movies explains why another character shouldn't have sex" scene**, and they can't even rip-off Friday the 13th correctly at the climax of the film.

On the other hand, Evil Laugh is constantly laugh out loud funny for purely unintentional reasons.Early in the film, for reasons I like to ascribe to as the "if the audience can't see it, neither can the character" camera angle, Johnny decides to pee off of a hill, and ends up urinating all over a biker and his girlfriend. The biker and his girlfriend never figure into the film again, but the moment is so pointless that I began chuckling in disbelief. More than one time during Evil Laugh I found myself asking aloud "is this a real movie? Am I actually watching this, or is it some kind of prank?"

 And then there's the sexually ambiguous Barney, who cuts a hole in Mark and Tina's bed so he can rub Mark's ass and disrupt the sex scene. There's a montage of dusting, dancing, and ass shaking, but because it isn't fair to just to involve the girls before you know it the camera is focused on Johnny, Mark, and Sammy's behinds too. When you find out who the killer is, if anyone bothered thinking about the movie at all, it wouldn't make sense that said person could kill Chief Cash and Freddy in one scene and be somewhere else in the next.

 But that's the charm of Evil Laugh; despite the fact that nothing works, everything evens out because so many odd choices on the part of Baio and Brascia compound on one another, providing and experience wholly beyond whatever it was they had in mind. Don't take my word for it; watch it yourself, in its entirety (and for free) on YouTube. It's the perfect "party movie," because you can wander off if you want, but when someone comes in and says "wait... did that really just happen?" you'll be able to say "yeah, that's Evil Laugh for you." Everybody wins!


* According to the end credits, it's actually 1986, which explains why it feels like a film from earlier in the decade.
** By the way, you'll see a lot of coverage about Scream that claims no slasher film acknowledged other slasher films before 1996, but even as a BAD example, Evil Laugh openly addresses Halloween and Friday the 13th by name, as well as prominently displaying Barney's interest in Fangoria.