“I cut off my hand, and not it’s gonna kill you all!”
We like to switch things up here at 31 Days of Fright. For every Rosemary’s Baby, you have to include a Little Shop of Horrors; for every Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a Rocky Horror Picture Show. Horror comes in all shapes and sizes; the malleability of the genre is partly responsible for its endurance. So Idle Hands seemed like a natural enough fit. Unfortunately, it’s not quite a horror comedy: too dull to be funny, too manic to be scary. There’s an impressive amount of gore, and some solid practical effects, but the rest of this film has aged like bread.
Anton Tobias is a lazy stoner. He just wants to watch cartoons and eat cereal without ever bothering to go to school. That’s exactly where we find him at the film’s beginning, hanging with his friends Mick and Pnub, mooning over the girl next door, Molly. He cares little for the serial killer prowling the town (in one of the few funny lines, Mick asks Anton if he watches the news; Anton replies, “I hate that fucking show”). We’re not supposed to sympathize with Anton right away – he really is very lazy – which would work in a better movie. The problem is with how annoying everyone is. This whole movie is like some 1990s Gogurt Mountain Dew fever dream. Everything is played at a manic pitch, underscored by a sense of ironic detachment that hasn’t aged well.
It turns out that Anton himself is the killer, his right hand having been possessed by an unknown malevolent force. The scene in which he discovers this could have been a gruesome bit of slapstick, but director Rodman Flender stages everything like a sight gag, and Devon Sawa plays Anton as a cartoon character, flailing about like Mr. Magoo from one horror to another. It’s mildly shocking when he kills both of his friends, but any sick sense of glee that would accompany the act is undermined by Sawa’s relentless mugging. It’s as if he asked what his motivation was, and Flender just handed him copies of early Jim Carrey movies.
When Mick and Pnub come back from the dead, Idle Hands really devolves into nonsense. Maybe this is asking too much from an “edgy” horror comedy made for annoying goth kids who hang out at the mall, but the mythos here makes absolutely no sense. Why do Mick and Pnub come back to life? None of Anton’s other victims do. How does Debi LeCure (Vivica A. Fox, dreadful) track him down? Sure, she sees that the cycle of possessions makes a pentagram, but what happens at the terminus? Will the possession just stop, or go dormant? We’re asked to take far too much at face value, and the movie just isn’t entertaining enough to let these things slide.
The performances are, by and large, terrible across the board. Seth Green and Elden Henson, and Mick and Pnub, do all right, but it’s a pretty low bar that they have to hurdle. Jessica Alba, as Molly, isn’t sure whether to play badass rebel (she rides a motorcycle and plays bass) or seductress, so she winds up doing a little bit of both. Of course, people are multitudinous by nature, but there is some truly schizophrenic writing on display here. Molly is one character until the second the script decides she has to be another. Also, Alba was 17 when she made this, which makes the film’s ogling of Molly pretty icky.
Everything in Idle Hands is like a sensory overload, especially the music. It’s just nonstop needle drops, and you can see how badly the film is trying to market its soundtrack, with “Santeria,” “Dragula,” and even The Offspring doing “I Wanna Be Sedated.” The character Randy is coded as Satanic, and the film subtly lets us know this by playing Van Halen’s “Shout at the Devil” in every scene he’s in. The song appears, I kid you not, three times.
Credit where it’s due, though: the practical effects are nicely done. After Anton severs his possessed hand, the hand moves around on its own, a puppet expertly operated by Christopher Hart (it was also the same hand from The Addams Family, a movie you should watch instead of this). The makeup effects on Green and Henson are well-done, especially with Pnub’s severed head. Henson plays decapitated well, which is a very odd sentence to write.
There’s not much to say about Idle Hands. It’s a stoner comedy in which marijuana is literally the deus ex machina. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe I’m not the target audience. The only thing I’ll remember about Idle Hands is how damn annoying it is. If you’re thinking about watching this movie, get a hold of a copy of Now That’s What I Call Music from 1998, and you’ll have the same experience.
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
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