Opinions upon a film are frequently divided between the “Critics” and “Audiences,” which subtly implies that the latter wouldn’t know a good feature if it bit them on the leg and that in the wake of such aesthetic legislators, moviegoers would chaotically deviate between viewings of Hal Warren’s Manos: The Hands of Fate and Paul Weiland’s Leonard Part 6. Furthermore, the implication is made that the latter solely exists for the purpose of ticket sales. Now, granted, Hollywood executives do indeed approach tentative projects with such in mind (Wouldn’t things get a bit more interesting if a majority of viewers where professional critics?) but, having said this, what’s so wrong about setting out to make a money maker which, gasp, is purely fun? Apparently, for the cinematic tyrants, everything that flickers upon the big screen is to be an effigy of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (yet, natch, to think that one could eclipse such a work is merely foolish) while everything else is mere set dressing that is to be patiently humored until science discovers how to reanimate Ol’ Orson who will undoubtedly set out to immediately make Citizen Kane II: The Return of Kane.
To this I say: Lighten up! How can anyone seriously approach a good-natured, postmodern, Generation X horror comedy that is equal parts Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London in which marijuana literally saves the day?
Apparently most every one of them can. Please, I beg you, put the flashlight pen down for a second and admit, damnit, that Mike Judge’s Office Space was fun! And you wonder why you never get invited to parties . . . .
A prototype slacker of his generation, Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa), whose only drives include marijuana consumption and television, discovers that his parents’ (Fred Willard and Connie Ray) two-day absence is a consequence of their having been murdered. When he consults his equally apathetic friends on the matter, Pnub (Elden Henson) and Mick (Seth Green), Anton’s hand slays them (yes, just his hand), thus revealing itself to be the culprit behind the recent series of killings throughout Bolan. In an attempt to rid himself of his inconvenient plight, Anton severs his possessed appendage, which proceeds to continue its homicidal course upon its own volition. Pnub and Mick come back as cynical zombies as they, along with Debi (Vivica A. Fox) and Randy (Jack Noseworthy), hasten to save Anton’s love interest, Molly (Jessica Alba), before Anton’s hand takes her into the fiery pits of Hell.
The power behind the campy goodness of Rodman Flender’s Idle Hands is the genre awareness that the characters possess and wryly express atop the cast’s deadpan delivery. As such, much would be lost in quoting a large portion of the material, save that, when Pnub questions whether or not Anton watches the news, the latter readily dismisses the notion via a huffy “I hate that show.”
Granted, the work malfunctions occasionally and, yes, the principle leads are indeed horrible actors, especially Alba (Green and Henson carry a large portion of the feature). But the work hits more often than it misses as Idle Hand’s screenwriters, Terri Hughes and Ron Milbauer, not only have the good sense to posit the action from the killer’s POV, thus making it a comedy (whereas as if Flender would have shot the work with the camera over Fox’s shoulder, the production would have, in turn, been a thriller), they offer a thoroughly witty, postmodern spoof of the period. For example, Pnub and Mick inform Anton of their decision to reject the joys of Heaven, “There was this bright white light at the end of a long tunnel, right, and there was these chicks’ voices, and [ . . . ] kinda uncool music, like, Enya. And these chicks’ voices, they were saying, ‘Come to us. Come towards the light.’ [But] [w]e figured, fuck it. I mean, it was really far!” Suffice it to say, when the boys do make it to the pearly gates, the accompanying soundtrack is not the standard female-led aria, but–fittingly–Sublime’s “Santeria.”
Again, how can you not love Rodman Flender’s Idle Hands, a film which literally does what so many of us hope and dream, that is, scalp Dexter Holland, the lead singer of the faux-punk band, Offspring, especially after having the audacity to attempt to cover the Ramones? That’s Rock ’n Roll equivalent of remaking Citizen Kane for Christ’s sake!
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
