There are movies that ask you to suspend your disbelief. Then there’s Idle Hands, which grabs your disbelief, gets it high, chops it off at the wrist and throws it through a Halloween house of horror themed school dance. Sounds cool – I’m in!
Devon Sawa plays Anton, a spectacularly lazy stoner whose life mostly revolves around weed, television and obsessing over his crush, played by Jessica Alba. Unfortunately, Anton’s right hand becomes possessed by an evil force and starts murdering people around him. As problems go, that’s probably worse than running out of weed, for Anton.
The entire movie is incredibly goofy. Not occasionally goofy. COMPLETELY goofy. It’s part horror movie, part stoner comedy, part teen romance and part “what the actual hell am I watching?” Somehow it mostly works because nobody involved seems remotely embarrassed by how oddball the premise is. Sawa commits completely to the physical comedy of fighting his own hand, while Seth Green and Elden Henson absolutely understand the assignment as Anton’s murdered best mates, Mick and Pnub, who return from the dead and basically decide being dead isn’t enough of an inconvenience to stop hanging around. They make for great comic relief sidekicks.
As far as possessed limb movies go, this packs a lot more punch than say, The Hand (Michael Caine) and probably sits up there with Body Parts (Jeff Fahey) for actual possessed limb carnage. The gore is also surprisingly good. Severed limbs, blood, practical effects and a possessed hand scuttling around causing all forms of mayhem.
Idle Hands happily embraces the sort of gross-out comedy the late 90s did so well. Throw in that unmistakable alternative-rock energy and even The Offspring turning up at the school dance, and this thing practically smells like 1999.
The goofiness, however, causes the film to have some absolutely GIGANTIC plot holes. The biggest one is Anton himself. By the time everything is over, there has basically been a mass murder spree with Anton’s fingerprints — quite literally — all over it. His parents are dead. His friends are dead-ish. Bodies are everywhere. Yet there appears to be virtually no police investigation, no jail, no legal repercussions and apparently nobody asking:
“Hey Anton, mate… WHAT THE EFF HAPPENED HERE?”
Instead, he winds up in hospital being hand-fed by Jessica Alba. Which, to be fair, was basically his lifelong ambition anyway. So I guess Anton wins.
This film’s story falls apart if you stare at it for more than about eleven seconds and logic was clearly not invited to the production meeting. But it IS SO MUCH FUN for a high-energy, raunchy, gorey Halloween horror film oozing with atmosphere. It has that wonderfully specific late-90s horror-comedy energy where a movie could be violent, stupid, horny, gross and weird without constantly apologising for itself.
Seth Green is hilarious, Devon Sawa throws himself into the insanity with Bruce Campbell levels of physical comedy and the practical gore gives the whole thing far more personality than it probably deserves.
It’s not the GOAT of horror films. But sometimes you don’t need Shakespeare. Sometimes you just need a murderous severed hand flipping people off.
Better wrap this review up as my one of my hands seems to have stopped responding to m-
8/10
James J