Dominick Brascia

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) My loathing for slasher films of the 1980s is never as high as when it degenerates into nihilistic splatter. Evil Laugh is just one single step above that — it’s not intensely detestable as much as completely forgettable. The plot, and stop me if you’ve heard that before, is about a group of young people being killed one by one while they are stuck in a remote location. Yes, it’s about as interesting as that sounds — the only halfway noteworthy element of the film is that it was produced in 1986, years after the peak of the slasher craze. You’d expect such a late entry to be somewhat more interesting or distinctive, but writer-director-producer Dominick Brascia plays like it was still 1981 and audiences could just watch this stuff indiscriminately. Of course, it’s now 2021 and there’s really nothing to see here — there’s some irony in having no nudity in a film starring Ashlyn Gere. The film shows some rudimentary self-awareness in referencing other slashers, but there’s nothing really noteworthy here… and then it gets into dumb sequences such as the microwave murder that just shows the contempt the filmmakers have for their audiences. No, there’s nothing worth laughing about in Evil Laugh, and even less worth seeing.