Slasher films of the 1980s are an almost inexhaustible supply of high-quality cinema, and the Steven Baio vehicle Evil Laugh (1986) is no exception. As a late-period slasher with copious cruelty and humor, one cannot go wrong with Evil Laugh.
Of course, some of your universe's critics are completely wrong about Evil Laugh. For example, reviewer loomis78-815-989034 writes (employing a well-known metaphor that at this point must be a cliche), "With horrible acting, a bad soundtrack and Chachi's brother on hand this horrid script unfolds like a belt from a bad onion." Reviewer petraliamarco writes, "There's zero tension and 90% of the movie is an absurd plot by one of the characters to sleep with another, while the others are getting killed, maybe?" And reviewer The_Void writes, "Overall, you would do well not to bother with Evil Laugh."
Read on for the truth about Evil Laugh...
The film begins with views of a large adobe-style house sporting a “For Lease” sign that has been vandalized with the words “STAY AWAY.”
The door has been similarly vandalized. A besuited, bespectacled (and, later revealed, be-toupeed) realtor named Mr. Burns stalks up to the house, determined to remove the graffiti. He is startled by a young man delivering groceries to the house’s new tenants. When Mr. Burns leaves to remove the lease sign due to the fact that the house is being rented, the young man puts the groceries away. Soon, the man leasing the house, a doctor intending for a group of “young interns” to stay in the house but who also plans to buy the house in the future, drives to the garage and reveals helpful plot details.
Meanwhile, the young man delivering groceries yells out to Mr. Burns (who is well out of earshot), demonstrating the sophisticated humor of the filmmakers. “Will you tell the tenants that I delivered everything? But my boss says we’re all out of liver and that we don’t stock bulls’ hearts or monkey brains — so he sent some extra chopped meat!”
Seconds later, in a sequence of artistically confusing timing, the delivery boy is gone and the doctor is in the kitchen, where he is suddenly brutally slashed by a man with a knife!
The killer, laughing maniacally, deposits the doctor’s heart in a mixing bowl.
After this classic slasher film opening, the movie proper begins with shots of young medical interns driving through Los Angeles toward the adobe-style house. Outside of LA, in a comedic sequence, interns Barney, Johnny, and Mark (two of whom appear persistently, and unwisely, shirtless) change a tire and then escape a threatening biker and his girlfriend when Johnny (played by Steven Baio, who also produced the film) inadvertently urinates on them from the top of a hill.
Meanwhile, the two female interns, Connie and Tina, are also waylaid in their Jeep, whose engine fails, though the probably is fixed immediately by a Fonzie-style fist bump.
Also, Sammy and Betty, a romantic couple and the final interns, sit in their car and give the audience more useful background information. Sammy tells Betty about Jerry, the doctor killed in the opening sequence that nobody knows is dead: “Jerry wants to buy this old house. You know he’s studying to become a pediatrician. Well, the place used to be a children’s foster home or something. We’re just gonna go up there are help him get the place back into shape.” He adds, “About 10 years ago, there was a murder up there. Jerry thought it might scare off the other kids.” (By “kids,” he means medical interns.)
Eventually, the young people arrive at the house; simultaneously, the grocery delivery boy is killed by a large drill in the basement.
As they cluelessly explore the house, Barney, Johnny, and Mark hear whispers in a closet, but when they open the door nothing is there. They are startled by Mr. Burns, who arrives from another door but cannot explain the voices they heard. “My cousin heard voices, too, before he was committed,” Mr. Burns says ominously. “Seriously, though, it was probably just the foundation settling.”
After one of the interns makes a timely joke referencing Dr. Kildare to Mr. Burns, the realtor leaves with his wife Sadie, who unsuspiciously wears gloves while she sits in her car.
Before the women arrive, Barney confesses to Johnny in a charming and not creepy way that “All I want this weekend is to get Tina in the pool, naked as a jaybird.” Johnny laughs and gooses his friend. (Barney also confesses that he hopes a “guy in a hockey mask named Jason doesn’t show up” before admitting that, “If I were a girl, I’d become a lesbian.”)
Once all seven medical students have arrived, they begin cleaning up the old house and wondering where Jerry is. They also engage in an amusing (and extremely long) montage where each medical student shakes his or her posterior while sweeping and/or dusting.
Later, Mark and Tina are the victims of Fangoria-reading practical joker Barney, who (perhaps implausibly) reaches out of the mattress on which they are having sex.
At dinner, where the interns unknowingly eat Jerry’s heart (which Barney unknowingly cooked), there is a long discussion about the inequities of medical education. Johnny says, referring to Sammy, “I’m saying some people aren’t very good doctors but manage to get into one of the best hospitals in the country.” Connie, fortunately for everyone involved, stops Sammy from attacking Johnny.
Meanwhile, in a scene that encapsulates the fun and suspense of a 1980s slasher film, we watch the local police chief speaking from his police car over a walkie-talkie with his civilian helper who is staked out in the woods in case any trouble occurs. The scene begins as comedic, as the young helper presents himself as a somewhat incompetent as a stake-out participant, but the scene turns suspenseful as the young man informs the chief that somebody is sitting in the back seat of his very police car! Needless to say, the scene ends poorly for both the chief and his incompetent sidekick.
After dinner, Connie (who is the late Jerry’s girlfriend) gathers everybody around a roaring fireplace to tell them what actually occurred in the old house. (Oddly, if you’ll forgive the digression, all the furniture is still covered with sheets, despite the long cleaning montage earlier.) “About ten years ago, it used to be a foster home for children. A nice old man named Wright ran the place and the old man hired an 18-year-old college student whose name was Martin to help him with the children. Martin was very cruel to the kids, and one day three of them accused Martin of molesting them.”
Cleverly, the filmmakers intercut Connie’s story with two other simultaneous events: interns Sammy and Betty retiring to their room to have sex (with handcuffs and gags), and Mr. Burns and his wife Sadie arguing about having sex (he wants to, she wants not to).
Connie’s story continues: “Martin was finally found innocent. The kids admitted that they lied but Martin’s father hung himself before finding out his son was not guilty. A week later, Martin returned to the house and cut the throats of all the children in their sleep. Then he set the house on fire and he killed himself. When the fire was put out, Martin’s body was never found, so the rumors started. Crazy stories about the ghost of Martin roaming the woods, killing everyone that wanders near this house.”
While Fangoria-reading Barney tries unsuccessfully to convince Sammy that having sex will lead to slasher Martin killing everyone (in a scene that prefigures Scream), the killer, giggling and wearing sneakers and blue gloves, menaces the handcuffed and gagged Betty, then kills both Betty and Sammy when he returns with a can of whipped cream.
Meanwhile, Mark and Johnny have a conversation about romantic strategy during a planned skinny-dipping party that can only be described as hilarious. “When you go swimming, there’s a surefire way to tell if she wants you,” says Mark. “Rub yourself all over her. Your arm, your legs, your butt. It turns them on!”
Later, Connie and Tina work on cleaning up a children’s room. Connie reveals she knows every detail of the children’s murder 10 years ago: “I’m just so fascinated with the story,” she says creepily.
Eventually, the film returns to its slasher roots with a scene in the basement where Mr. Burns has returned to the house to fix the boiler. He encounters the slasher, who removes a mask (we have not seen the killer’s mask or face yet), revealed to be someone known to Mr. Burns. “Oh, it’s you,” Mr. Burns says. “Why are you wearing that mask?”
The slasher slashes Mr. Burns, resulting in the point of the knife erupting from the poor man’s posterior.
As the film moves into its final act, the interns have their pool party, which involves no skinny-dipping and in fact only lasts a minute or two. After some sexual misunderstandings between Connie and Johnny and Tina and Mark, the body count increases. Tina and Mark are next to go, Mark by axe in the head and Tina by strangulation. Johnny is incapacitated and then killed with a microwave oven that sits conveniently on the floor (the killer apparently behaving with irony in mind because Johnny is an X-ray technician and X-rays and microwaves are part of the radiation spectrum).
Connie, who wears a Catalina Island State University t-shirt that reveals the university’s motto is actually “Catalina Island State University,” discovers blood and sensibly calls the sheriff, then wanders around the house carrying a handgun.
After Connie finds various slashed bodies in the basement, including that of her fiancé Jerry, the killer reveals himself (and his mask for the first time).
Connie shoots the killer, who reveals herself quite quickly to be Mr. Burns’s wife Sadie, who is also Martin’s mother, motivated by the fact that Martin never molested the children. The gunshot, though producing a great deal of blood, does not appear to injure Sadie at all. “He was too sensitive. That’s why he died. People like you hurt him.” She admits, “I killed everyone for my baby.”
When Sadie lunges (i.e., steps forward) toward Connie, an unexpected turn of events occurs. Barney, who has been hiding nearby and has retrieved the gun, shoots Sadie twice. She falls over and Connie embraces Barney.
Barney (note that the audience knew he was alive) explains, “I’m locked down here. I don’t know what to do. I’m screaming my idiot head off. And I start thinking, all these horror movies I’ve been seeing, she wouldn’t kill me if she thought I was already dead.”
Connie further explains, “She couldn’t accept the fact that her son was dead, and when her second husband was going to sell the place, she went crazy.”
Having neatly tied everything up, Barney and Connie walk out of the basement, unaware that Sadie is still alive. She lifts her head and laughs, then falls again, apparently dead. (Her laugh, and in fact the title of the film, is never explained.)
In the film’s rather tasteless coda, Connie is stalked by what she believes is the masked Sadie, but it is in fact Barney playing a practical joke, to which Connie retaliates by grabbing a nearby pair of scissors.
The End
Directed by the late Dominick Brascia, who played one of the murder victims in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) and who would go on to direct Hard Rock Nightmare (1988), Evil Laugh is a fast-moving slasher film whose only weakness might be that typical weakness of nearly all movies -- the title has little to do with the film itself. While the killer does laugh occasionally before killing, laughter has nothing to do with her motivations, or indeed anything else in the film. If the filmmakers had tied laughing into the story, Evil Laugh might have become an acknowledged classic rather than an unacknowledged one. Also, they might have considered showing the killer's mask earlier than the film's climax, if only for branding purposes. Nevertheless, Evil Laugh is good solid late-1980s entertainment, and it features not only one of the (I assume) many Baio brothers, it also stars as Tina a woman named Jody Gibson, who would go on to infamy as the "Hollywood Super Madam." So that happened.