t's Halloween, and there's a serial killer loose in the town of Bolan. But slacker
teen Anton Tobias (Sawa) wouldn't know it--he's too busy lying on the sofa,
toking up and watching porn on cable.
In fact, the only thing that gets him off his butt isn't the lack of
milk or dog food in the house--or even the fact that his parents haven't
been around for the last couple of days. It's his empty hash pipe, which he
disguises as an asthma inhaler and keeps on a string around his neck.
But his equally inert friends across the street, Mick (Green) and Pnub
(Henson), can't help him out (they're saving their weed for themselves).
That's when Anton spies girl-next-door Molly (Alba), for whom he's
harboring a major crush, but is too shy to speak.
Back at home, he discovers the corpses of Mom and Dad. That's when Mick
and Pnub come in, see the clues and realize Anton's the killer.
Anton's busy explaining how that's not possible when some kind of force
takes over his right hand. Before he knows it, Anton's shoved a broken beer
bottle into Mick's skull and Frisbee'd a saw blade into Pnub's noggin.
What to do? The hand draws him back to Molly's house, where it engineers
a close encounter with her. As Molly's parents arrive home, the couple make
a date for the big Halloween dance.
Back home again, Anton discovers to his horror that his friends are back
from the dead and hanging out as if nothing happened. He enlists their help
to figure out how to stop his hand from killing again. Each attempt results
in more deaths--until Anton gets the bright idea to cut the hand off. But he then
realizes that the hand is now free to wreak more mayhem--and it's
apparently set its sights on Molly.
"What do we look like, total losers?"
Idle Hands appears to have been thought up as a satire of the
teen-horror film, a la Scream and that film's progeny. It has a clever
premise--slacker demons--and revives the killer-hand horror genre. But it
lacks Scream's wit and originality, and it doesn't offer many laughs or
much subtext to leaven the gore.
Without the satire, the movie comes off as more of an exercise in
bad taste than anything. The film's humor relies on stale bits about
getting high or trying to score with unbelievably gorgeous teen-aged vamps,
particularly Alba, who spends much of the movie dressed in negligees. The
horror is based on cheap shock effects and gross-outs.
Beyond that, the three main characters are virtually interchangeable.
Only the efforts by the cast, particularly Green and Hansen, make them
anything more than slapstick cartoon characters. Once Sawa's character
figures out his hand is possessed, he jerks around in Jim Carrey-like
spasms trying to control it. This is funny at first, but grows old fast.
The bulk of the plot concerns Sawa's attempts to stop his hand from
committing the inevitable, while at the same time trying to get close to
Molly. But that key relationship defies credibility from the start. Molly
at one point invites the spastic, sweaty and blood-stained Anton into her
bedroom, puts on soft music and makes out with him even as he's trying to
strangle her. Huh?
An underdeveloped subplot has Fox pursuing the evil force behind the
possession as a sort of Vivica the Hand Slayer. None of this is taken very
seriously, and most of it plays like farce, which undercuts any suspense or
horror.
Which is not to imply that the film stints on effects. There's plenty of
graphic murders and some disgusting visuals, including a sequence
involving a microwave oven that is truly revolting. That, the casual drug
use, foul language and underage sexual situations give the film a
well-deserved "R" rating.
