IDLE HANDS
USA. 1999. Director - Rodman Flender, Screenplay - Terri Hughes & Ron Milbauer, Producers - Jennifer & Suzanne Todd, Photography - Christopher Baffa, Music - Graeme Revell, Music Supervisor - John Houlihan, Visual Effects - VCE (Supervisors - Peter Kuran & Ted Rae), Special Effects Supervisor - Lou Carlucci, Makeup Effects - Cannom Creations (Supervisors - Greg Cannom, Brian Swipe & Todd Tucker), Makeup Effects Designed & Produced by Keith Vanderlaan, Production Design - Greg Melton. Production Company - Licht-Mueller Film Corp/Team Todd. Devon Sawa (Anton Tobias), Seth Green (Mick), Eldon Henson (Pnub), Jessica Alba (Molly), Jack Noseworthy (Randy), Vivica A. Fox (Sister Debi Liquer)
Plot: The town of Bolan is being terrorized by a killer. Teenage slacker and dopehead Anton Tobias makes the discovery, after finding his parents bodies, that he is the killer and that his right hand is possessed by a demonic spirit that always takes over the laziest person it can find. His murderous hand kills his two best friends who return as zombies. But the three of them find that not even severing his hand manages to stop it.
In the last couple of years, the teen horror film has made a major revival. It was all begun with 1996's ‘Scream' which nostalgiacally looked back to slasher films of the mid-1980s while wittily parodying the conventions of the genre. Its success was followed by the likes of the ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer' films, ‘Urban Legend' (1998), ‘Disturbing Behavior' (1998) and ‘The Faculty' (1998), as well as the cult success of tv's ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (1997- ). If ‘Halloween', ‘Friday the 13th' and their copious imitators were horror films of the early 1980s Me Generation leftovers, then these are Generation X horror films. Here the anonymous teens that filled the mid-1980s equivalents have been replaced by a more savvy, cynical teens who come wittily post-informed by the conventions of the genre and who will compare and paraphrase their situation with in-referents to other horror films at the drop of a hat. At their best - the likes of ‘Scream and ‘The Faculty' - these films are witty and intelligent genre deconstructions; at their least, the likes of ‘I Still Know What You Did Last Summer' and ‘Urban Legend', these are sad copies of films that lack the werewithal to see they are jumping on a bandwagon that roots itself in media self-awareness and end up in a case of the Emperor's New Clothes, of merely being slasher film imitators made on an A-budget.
If the ‘Scream' films et al are Generation X horror films, then ‘Idle Hands' is surely the first slacker horror film -one of its continuing comic riff concerns itself with the three principal teens' dope-smoking habits. But sadly there isn't a great deal to the film more than half a concept. (And most of its ideas are stolen from other films - the possessed and severed hand idea seems a feature-length expansion of the comic sequence that was done with far greater sophistry in ‘The Evil Dead II', the two undead friends are a blatant steal from ‘An American Werewolf in London'). The overall idea of a possessed hand is fairly lame - and in terms of horror the hand holds so little threat as to border on the laughable. And nothing on screen has any inspiration that transforms the film anywhat either - the scenes with Sawa contorting about as he fights his hand come out as singularly unfunny. A good comic performer and mime artist could have made this work but Sawa's performance abilities are thoroughly unexceptional. There's one mildly amusing sequence where Sawa's hand makes aggressive moves on Jessica Alba leaving him torn between its aggression and his natural introversion but which she decides she rather likes, even taking him tying his hand up to the bed as something kinky. The whole film gives the impression of wanting to open up into something much more raucous and vulgar, but director Flender does the criminal thing for this type of film - he is too tame, his vulgarity lacks imagination. At least it's a better film than Flender's debut feature ‘Leprechaun 2' (1994).
Reviewed by Richard Scheib
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews