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It's tough to get too righteous about a movie with the chutzpah to have a disembodied hand strangle an amorous couple dressed up in KISS makeup (the couple, not the hand – although that would have been even funnier) while Ace Frehley's "New York Groove" issues from the sound track. But it's also inadvisable to say much good about a film that has Seth Green deliver the line "All you do is smoke pot and watch TV all day – don't get me wrong, that's what life is all about," then proceed to make cannabis look like a worthwhile obsession even post-mortem.
Idle Hands stars Devon Sawa (from Wild America, which was about nature photography, not drugs) as Anton, a slacker so slack he doesn't even bother to get dressed when he has interrupt his passive supplications at the cathode-ray altar to replenish his stash. Nor is he overly concerned by his parents' recent absence (we know they were messily killed by some unseen bugaboo in a prologue so cheap-looking you might think it's a really bad horror flick the characters were supposed to be watching, except the rest of movie has the same chintzy quality, like a video tape that's been recorded over too many times). When, accompanied by buds Mick (Green) and Pnub (Elden Hensen, who was excellent in The Mighty), he finds their corpses integrated into the family's elaborate Halloween decorations, it quickly becomes apparent that Anton, or at least his belligerent right hand, is responsible, as well as for the recent rash of equally grisly murders around town. We know this because he stabs Mick in the brain with a broken beer bottle, and decapitates Pnub with a rotary-saw blade. But they're even lazier than Anton, clambering out of a makeshift backyard grave after they can't find the ambition to follow the white light and "Enya music" (which also got a more flattering reference in Entrapment; Sean likes Enya) to the afterlife. Plus, their buzz has worn off, so they're feeling a little dry and hungry from the stress of getting killed. After some nonsense about a druidic priestess (Viveca A. Fox) who knows what's going on, and Anton's emergency surgery with a meat cleaver, he, Mick (beer still sloshing in the half-bottle protruding from his skull), Pnub (noggin haphazardly duct-taped in place) and the druid descend on a Halloween dance where The Offspring are playing neat Ramones covers, hopefully to save Anton's new gurrrllfriend (Jessica Alber, who was one of the status clique in Never Been Kissed) from being taken to Hell at midnight by the now-ambulatory hand.
The creative team of TV director Rodman Flender (episodes of "Dawson's Creek," "Party of Five," and "Millennium") and a couple fledgling writers (one of whose chief credit seems to be that he does voices for "Power Rangers") try to emulate the high-spiritedness of such films as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy (in which Bruce Campbell also faced a hand with a mind of its own), unleashing a few good-natured gross-outs aimed at keeping video-nasty fans happy. But while Flender does show some occasional playfulness with the camera, his supposed aim of telling a whacked-out morality tale about what too much wasted, wasted time can lead to gets lost in adoration for the demon weed. Well, at least his friends know what to get him for Christmas. C-
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