Idle Hands would like us to believe it's a horror/comedy movie -- a kind of Scream with a higher dosage of campy humor. There's just one problem: it's not scary and it's not funny. In fact, it takes a creative stretch to come up with anything nice to say about this motion picture. There are a lot of bad movies around; Idle Hands transcends that mundane level of badness into the realm of gross ineptitude. While watching this movie, three questions echoed through my mind like the refrain to a song: "What were they thinking?", "Is it too late to get to the baseball game?", and "Why is the theater floor so sticky?" I admit to having chuckled once; that's why the movie gets a generous one star instead of none.
In last year's Fallen, the soul of a killer leapt from body to body, possessing victims at will. Idle Hands uses a similar premise: an evil spirit moves from one host to the next except, instead of capturing the whole body, it only takes over one hand. The most recent unfortunate victim is slacker Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa), a high school student who spends his days smoking pot and watching TV. When the incarnation of pure evil seizes control of one hand, he kills both of his parents (Fred Willard and Connie Ray), then proceeds to smash one friend (Seth Green) in the head with a bottle before decapitating another (Elden Hensen). Soon these two are back, albeit as zombies, and, fortunately for Anton, they don't hold a grudge. Meanwhile, in addition to forcing Anton to randomly kill people, the hand proves to be a major detriment to his love life. After all, it's tough to take the girl of his dreams (played by Jessica Alba) to the big Halloween dance when he might end up strangling or stabbing her on the way.
Admittedly, this sounds like it has some comic potential, and, done right, it might have been enjoyable in the same way that Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies are. The problem is, the humor is so predictable and sophomoric that it's just not funny. Screenwriters Terri Hughes and Ron Milbauer don't seem to recognize the difference between low-brow comedy that makes people laugh (There's Something About Mary) and stupid humor that makes viewers wonder if sitting through the Barney movie might be more entertaining. Those who enjoy gore will find that Idle Hands offers plenty of grotesque elements: headless bodies, spattered blood, cats playing with eyeballs, a hand exploding in a microwave, and Devon Sawa attempting to imitate Steve Martin's performance from All of Me (when he shared a body with Lily Tomlin).
As in seemingly all movies featuring high school students, the climax occurs at a big dance. It's there that the hand, now liberated from Anton's body thanks to the intervention of a meat cleaver, decides to culminate its killing spree. It's also there that the foxy exterminator of evil, Debi (Vivica A. Fox), who has been hunting the hand, finally confronts it. The resulting struggle falls considerably short of Van Helsing's battles with Dracula, or even Dr. Loomis' tete-a-tetes with Michael Myers. Instead, we get an attractive woman chasing around something that looks like a refugee from The Addams Family while two zombies and a handless wonder watch her back.
No one in the cast distinguishes himself or herself in a positive way. As awful as Sawa is, he's given a run for his money by castmates Jessica Alba, Jack Noseworthy, and Katie Wright. Seth Green (Can't Hardly Wait) and Elden Hensen (The Mighty) fare better; they bring a certain degree of wit to their status as the local undead. The biggest name in the film is arguably Fred Willard, and he doesn't make it past the halfway point of the first reel. Vivica A. Fox does a nice job chewing on her lines; too bad they weren't better written.
Director Rodman Flender has created a film with no obvious target audience. Horror fans won't be amused. Those expecting a comedy will be aghast. This is, quite simply, terrible film making. It's like bad Steven King crossed with bad Saturday Night Live. Perhaps the goal was to create some sort of cult classic for slackers, but it's hard to imagine anyone developing the kind of ardent passion for Idle Hands that would be necessary to lift it to such an exalted status. Instead, it will likely play for a couple of weeks in theaters before taking its turn on video store shelves and in late-night cable TV slots. It still won't be worth watching, and even those with idle hands should be able to find something better to do.
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