Director: Dominick Brascia
Script: Steven Baio
Cast: Steven Baio, Kim McKawy, Tony Griffin, Jody Gibson, Johnny Venocur, Jerold Pearson
Running time: 91.5 minutes
Year: 1986
Certificate: 18
Following the success of films such as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) many other filmmakers jumped on the ‘Slasher’ film band wagon and for the next decade or so dozens were churned out, some good and some pretty dire. Evil Laugh leans more to the latter camp, but is still a lot of fun and, in some ways, was ahead of its time.
Written by and starring Scott – Happy Days – Baio’s brother, Steven, Evil Laugh has fun with the sub-genre that it’s homaging and, for all its faults – and it does have plenty – it manages to hold the attention and entertain.
The film starts with the murder of a young doctor, Jerry, who’s invited some of his medical student friends, and his girlfriend, to a large property that he’s planning on buying that needs some renovation work doing on it; essentially for a weekend ‘painting party’, if you like. When the rest of them turn up, the body has gone and they make themselves at home and get down to some cleaning in one of the cheesiest/campiest scenes that I’ve ever seen, but in a good way, replete with an underlying Cyndi Lauder-type of pop song playing in the background – on a ghetto-blaster, no less.
As day turns to night the medics start getting ‘bumped off’ one-by-one, after first hearing what happened at the house years ago, when a number of children were killed.
As the bodies start piling up, the final couple of medics realise the danger they’re in and fight back against the maniac with the evil laugh…
Evil Laugh is a slasher film that had passed me by, which isn’t really surprising since it had a delayed US release, not coming out until 1988, and never received a UK video release. This is unfortunate as the film is a lot more fun than some of the other, more po-faced ‘slashers’ that came out around the same time.
While the movie doesn’t really stand out from others in the subgenre, with particularly memorable murders or villain, it is quite meta, with one character – who’s reading Fangoria magazine throughout – commenting on their situation being similar to a slasher film and latterly becoming a hero, of sorts. And, all this, 10 years before the admittedly better Scream came out. It must be said though that the writer of Scream, Kevin Williamson, had seen Evil Laugh and credits it as being an inspiration to him…
Seeing as the budget was very small, director Dominick Brascia and the rest of the small crew do their best with very limited resources and the film is quite professionally made, considering most were first-timers to filmmaking. In fact, the producers wisely hired an experienced DoP, who knew about low-budget filmmaking, and this clearly shows. The actors were mostly made of friends of the producers, but most still having some limited acting experience, including Steve Biao himself, whose character spends most of the film shirtless, mostly for no good reason. A couple of the actresses later went on to have interesting careers, but not in ‘normal’ films, shall we say. And the visual effects, by David Cohen, aren’t too shabby either, considering. Even the insane microwave murder is fairly well staged, if totally nonsensical.
My main bugbears with the film are some weirdly distorted sounds here and there, which might be due to technical issues with the disc, and the postscript ending, which didn’t really work for me and certainly doesn’t align with one of the character’s personalities from the rest of the movie.
Overall, Evil Laugh will have most viewers, well those who have affection for the ‘slasher’ genre and for films from the 1980s, smiling nostalgic smiles, as it ticks all the typical ‘slasher’ movie boxes, plus a few extra ones. 88 Films should therefore be congratulated for rescuing another 80s horror from unfair obscurity.
88 Films have done a great job on the presentation of the film as it looks as good as any film that was shot on 16mm can do and the sound quality is decent too, apart from the aforementioned distortions. There are a number of special features on the disc including;
Audio commentary with the Hysteria Continues– The ‘slasher’ podcast group led by Justin Kerswell, talk about the film and its place within the slasher pantheon. They talk about it being a ‘meta’ movie and how some of the cast and crew have had chequered histories. They also point out that the actor who plays the delivery boy at the beginning was also in Troma’s Surf Nazis Must Die.
The Joy of Laughter – Making Evil Laugh (74 mins) – A feature-length making-of documentary that provides a great deal of interesting detail as to how the film came about, about its pre-production, production and post-production stages, and how it was distributed; or not, as the case may be. All of the participants seem really up for talking about the film, and although it was principally shot in just 7 days they all enjoyed working on it and have only good memories. For example, they recall sometimes sleeping on location on the floor, to save time, and that they shot using 16mm ‘short-ends’, which made for a very limited number of takes. On a positive note, the film did get distribution in cinemas in the States, even playing alongside Good Morning Vietnam at one point.
