Evil Laugh (1988)
Cast: Steven Baio, Tony Griffin, Kim McKamy, Jody Gibson
Director: Dominick Brascia
Synopsis: Friday the 13th meets The Big Chill says the blurb - if only it was so!
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

Now there are bad movies. There are bombs, turkeys, duds, clangers and stinkers—many of them gloriously entertaining in their own spectacularly incompetent way. Then there are those so stupendously inept that the viewer has to pinch themselves repeatedly just to make sure they aren't hallucinating.

Evil Laugh—"Friday the 13th meets The Big Chill," proudly proclaims the blurb on the DVD cover—belongs firmly in every one of those categories, but most of all in the last.

Remember...

...never trust a book—or a DVD—by its cover.

It is a lesson I have sadly yet to master.

First, the plot.

A group of acutely retarded—and terminally randy—medical students arrive at a remote mansion to help a friend renovate the place. Predictably, their plans go spectacularly awry when a masked killer turns up to spoil the festivities.

From the very outset the acting is embarrassingly amateurish and it quickly becomes apparent that this is little more than a no-budget, brain-dead slasher film shot by a bunch of friends, none of whom appear to have possessed even the faintest prospect of a career in acting. The screenplay is only marginally more sophisticated than that of an average pornographic film, while the production values and camerawork somehow manage to sink even lower.

In true brain-dead 1980s slasher tradition, our moronic medical students are dispatched one by one in increasingly extravagant fashion—including one unfortunate soul whose head is exploded inside a microwave oven.

However, if the acting is dreadful, the gore effects are unimaginably dire.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this miserable experience, however, comes in the form of the recurring musical numbers that punctuate the film throughout. These specially written pop-disco songs should have you reeling in utter despair and lunging desperately towards the Stop button on your DVD player...

...assuming, of course, that you were ever unfortunate enough to have this particular turd in your machine to begin with.

But go with the flow.

Enjoy them for what they are.

Sublimely hideous, gloriously tacky slabs of musical cheese, painful enough to qualify as an exercise in sadomasochism.

Oh yes...

...the "evil laugh" of the title refers to the masked killer himself, who suffers repeated fits of giggles while merrily dispatching his victims with axes, knives, machetes and, naturally, microwave ovens.

Then comes the obligatory shock ending, one so staggeringly idiotic that you'll probably find yourself enrolling in evening classes for Higher Thought Development afterwards, simply to recover your equilibrium.

As though matters were not already bad enough, the film repeatedly resorts to infantile comedy in order to stagger from one scene to the next, thereby increasing its appeal to dedicated masochists.

There is not a shred of suspense.

No effective shocks.

No worthwhile gore.

No excitement.

In fact, this is a sorry excuse for a horror film that isn't remotely frightening—unless, of course, you count those songs. The screenplay is so appalling it almost succeeds in making Friday the 13th resemble Shakespeare.

The film is so catastrophically inept in every department that it commits the one unforgivable sin.

It is terminally boring.

Consequently, apart from those astonishing musical numbers, there is absolutely nothing to recommend this festering lump of cinematic sewage. Even hardened horror devotees may struggle to endure the experience despite the film's mercifully brief running time.

The commentary track provides one final laugh. The filmmakers rather proudly suggest that they anticipated Wes Craven's Scream years in advance because one of their characters understands "the rules" of slasher films.

Fat lot of good it did them.

The DVD sleeve has the breathtaking audacity to proclaim:

"This horror classic is one every true collector of the macabre will want to own on DVD!"

Yeah.

Right.

Avoid at all costs unless you happen to require an especially effective method of torturing unwanted guests or encouraging lingering visitors to leave.

The experience raises two deeply embarrassing questions:

a) How does one end up paying good money for a piece of shite that amounts to nothing more than some misguided wannabe's glorified home movie?

b) More importantly...

...how does one actually sit through the entire thing?

Had I noticed Krishna Shah's name among the executive producers beforehand, perhaps this pitiful ordeal might have been avoided altogether.

Ah well.

What's done is done.