Idle Hands (1999)

Posted on Jan 28, 2004 under Comedy, Horror |

Directed by Rodman Flender
Written by Terri Hughes and Ron Milbauer
Starring
- Devon Sawa
- Seth Green
- Elden Henson
- Jessica Alba
- Vivica A. Fox

Few kinds of movies can go as terribly, terribly wrong as horror-comedies. (Except maybe straight horror films. And pure comedies too, I guess. In fact, just about any genre can easily sink under the weight of its own suckitude. So much for starting this review with a defensible thesis.) For one thing, horror-comedies rarely have any honest horror in them. You know I’m right, so don’t get huffy; did you honestly think that Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness were trying to scare you? How about Bad Taste or Dead Alive? Too many directors think that a horror-comedy is supposed to alternate between the horrific and the comedic, when in reality, the comedy suffuses the entire production. You can have confined moments of horror, but the presence of comedy informs the tone of the whole. If there’s a garlic clove in your milkshake, you don’t need to bite into it to know it’s there.

You can take it as a bad sign that, after the horror-comedy ad campaign that accompanied Idle Hands’ theatrical release, the DVD cover bills it only as a comedy, with no indication on the front that there’s anything gory about it. And you could take it as an even worse sign that both of the laudatory review quotes on the back are from a couple of the most notorious quotewhores in Hollywood (Jeff Craig of Sixty Second Reviews and Mark S. Allen of UPN Good Day Sacramento, in case you were wondering).

“You’ve mistaken me for Scooby-Doo, perhaps?”

But things are not as hopeless as it may seem at this point. Sure, no other reviewer had much good to say about it, but I think that’s largely because the first half of the movie contains all of its fatal missteps; by the time things hit their stride, too many reviewers had already gone home.

In an opening that apes more older horror movies than I’d care to count, a middle-aged couple (Fred Willard and Connie Ray) are just putting themselves to bed a few days before Halloween when they see a mysterious message written on the ceiling above their bed in fluorescent (hey, I spelled it right on the first try!) paint: “IM UNDER THE BED.” No, they don’t find anything under the bed, but they’re understandably spooked when they start hearing noises downstairs… and in short order, both meet gory, painful ends. Yeah, that’s just the way to start a comedy.

Their teenaged son Anton (Devon Sawa) doesn’t even notice their absence for a couple of days. Why? Well, mainly because he’s a half-baked layabout; if it doesn’t involve the television or marijuana, he’s pretty much oblivious to it. Even his friends, Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub¹ (Elden Henson), themselves pothead couch potatoes, think him singularly lacking in ambition and character. Why, he doesn’t even know there’s a serial killer loose in their small town of Bowen, and that there’s a mandatory 9pm curfew! He also doesn’t know how to speak to the stunning girl across the street, Molly (Jessica Alba, and let’s get this out of the way right now: mmrRROOWRrr!).

One more time: mmrRROOWRrr!

Meanwhile, in Beaver, Utah, there’s a black nun trying to see a police prisoner being held for mass murder. Surprise! She’s not really a nun, she’s Debi (Vivica A. Fox), a Druid priestess who’s hunting an immortal evil thingie. (I’m guessing the producers have never been to Beaver, Utah. I have — and trust me, a black nun is about the least inconspicuous disguise you could pick.) But her quarry has left its latest host, and now she turns her sites toward clippings of killings… in Bowen.

In case you’re wondering, no, we haven’t gotten to the good half yet. Everything so far has mixed like oil and water, with a played-straight dual murder sitting uneasily beside Anton’s casual stupidity. Having two writers credited with the script seems oddly appropriate, as if one wrote the comedy, one wrote the horror, and nobody saw both halves together until they each brought their pages to the set on the first day of shooting.

So. Anton finally starts noticing things wrong around the house, like a bloodied breadknife in the silverware drawer, and the human eyeball that the cat is playing with. His parents never left the house, it turns out; their bodies were just stuffed inside the jack-o-lantern dummies sitting proudly in the front window. And it’s only when Mick and Pnub join him that Anton start’s seeing other clues — like the scrap of cloth in his mother’s hand that matches the edge of his T-shirt, or the bloody letters “ANT” written in a corner of the hardwood floor, or (OK, let’s really strain suspension of disbelief here) the spatters of fluorescent paint on his right hand that he hadn’t noticed until this very second.

Hmm. Chilly out?

Well, the conclusion is obvious: Anton is the killer! But it’s not really him; instead, it’s his right hand, which chooses this moment to go berserk and chase after Mick and Pnub, dragging the rest of him with it. Mick expires with a broken beer bottle puncturing his temple; Pnub has his head detached with a thrown sawblade. The hand even tosses the family cat through the window and across the street. And what is Anton’s reaction to all of this?

To go after the cat, naturally. And when the hand’s machinations bring him to the attention of pretty Molly, his biggest concern isn’t the growing pile of corpses at his house, it’s how to keep the hand from interrupting them while he gets some nookie.

Yes, this is the low point. Let’s leave aside for the moment the incredible script contrivance of having Molly find endearing all of the inside things that near-stranger Anton is doing to keep his hand in check. Instead, let’s complain that, even by the low-water behavior standards we’ve come to expect from “zany” comedies, Anton’s lack of regard for the people dead at his hand (literally) is unforgivably callous. Remember, his parents’ death was played as straight horror, not as a comic bit; nor were we even given the shorthand justification of having them be mean asses who “deserved” it. What we have here is the double standard of filmmakers who’d like to make the movie as if it were “real” horror, but don’t want to bother dealing with the baggage the story creates.

When the knitting pothead is the one who seems most normal, well…

So. After sucking face with Molly, Anton comes back home and buries four corpses in his back yard, with a half-hearted eulogy that sounds as regretful as if he had broken a plate from his mother’s favorite china service. And then…

…Then his two friends rise from the grave as zombies and clock him over the head. When he comes to, they’re watching TV on the couch, as casual and natural as the living dead can be.

Yes, this is where things start looking up. Why? Because this is our first indication that the whole movie (at least from this point onward) is going to play by the rules of the better horror-comedies, with a premise so outlandish that the death and destruction don’t have to be taken any more seriously than they would be in a Looney Toons short. Mick and Pnub’s reanimation doesn’t have anything to do with Anton’s possessed hand; they just thought that what they saw of the afterlife looked pretty lame (”Enya music,” Pnub scoffs), so they wandered back thisaway to crash with Anton.

Wait! Wait! I meant to put that on ‘defrost’!

In fact, from here on out, Mick and Pnub make the movie. (The severed head gags alone brightened my day.) While Anton tries to deal with his murderous limb, even going so far as to cut it off with a meatcleaver (yes, this entire movie is an expansion of one ten-minute segment from Evil Dead 2), they stand around with him, good natured and jovial but essentially unconcerned. I mean, they’re dead; what else could happen to them?

Oh yeah, there are more plot complications, like the entity in the now-severed-but-still-mobile hand choosing Molly as his Halloween sacrifice, and the eventual collaboration between our friendly bakeheads and Debi the Druid to catch it at the high school Halloween dance… but for all intents and purposes, the best parts are whenever Mick and Pnub are on screen, doing their low-key undead bakehead routine. I mean, it’s not like you really need to take anything else seriously anymore; what genuine stakes are there in a story where a kid who cuts off his own hand can immediately run all around town like nothing’s happened (aside from not being able to run a manual transmission)?

It’s a terribly flawed movie overall, but at least by the end it takes a turn for the better when the creative powers-that-be stop trying to make a movie that’s either horror or comedy from scene to scene, and instead finishes up as a comedy that builds jokes off the horror material.

Some Notable Totables:

body count: 14
breasts: 2 (so THAT’S why Playmate Kelly Monaco has a small role)
explosions: 0
ominous thunderstorms: 0
springloaded cats: 1
actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Randy Oglesby (”Sheriff Buchanan”) played “Ah-Kel/Ro-Kel” in the DS9 episode “Vortex”, “Silaran Prin” in the DS9 episode “The Darkness and the Light”, “Kir” in in the Voyager episode “Counterpoint”, and “Trena’L” in the Enterprise episode “Unexpected”, and currently has a recurring Enterprise role as “Degra”