#328 -- Idle Hands (1999)

Director: Rodman Flender
Rating: 4 / 5

Oh, how I love reminders of my childhood. I was nine years old when this movie came out, and I watched it constantly as a kid. I even taped it from my TV, along with Cherry Falls and Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th. It was one of my favorite movies back then, and it had been way too long since I'd seen it. Watching it now, I can see that it's not a perfect movie at all; but I still think it's absolutely wonderful.

Devon Sawa stars as Anton, a slacker/stoner with not much going for him. Okay, nothing going for him. There's been a string of murders going on in his town, but he doesn't know anything about that, of course. He's too busy watching cartoons and getting high. But one night, the murders come into his house, when he finds his parents dead bodies. He starts to think that, maybe, he had something to do with it. It becomes undeniable when he accidentally kills his two best friends, Mick and Pnub (played by Seth Green and some other guy). His hand has a mind of its own, he can't control anything he does, and the hand wants to kill everyone around him. He eventually decides that the only solution is to cut the hand off; but that doesn't kill it, it just gives it more mobility and it becomes more dangerous than ever.

As in every horror movie, there's a character that knows everything about what's going on. That character comes in the form of Vivica A. Fox. She travels the world in search of the possessed hand (which, I guess, jumps from body to body, though I'm not sure) hoping to stop it from taking an innocent soul to Hell with it. The innocent soul that it's after this time is Anton's girlfriend, Molly (Jessica Alba), and they've got to save her before the hand can get to her.

As a kid, all I saw when I watched this was a whole bunch of awesome. I still see that, of course, but I can recognize the flaws now. Like, back then, I never even questioned how Mick and Pnub came back from the dead. I thought, "Zombies! Awesome!" Now, though, I really do wonder how the fuck that happened. They said something about a bright light, but it was too far away, so they just turned back around. Typical stoners. There are definitely parts of the story that don't make sense, but that doesn't even matter. It's always been an awesome movie, and it always will be. It's got some creepy things going for it: the glow-in-the-dark writing on the ceiling that says "I'm under the bed," the zombies, and the murder stuff. All of that was really well done, I thought, and the effects were great. There was an awful lot of comedy in there too; it was very dark comedy, but great comedy too. IMDB says it's horror, but I'm sure a lot of people just call it comedy. There's just too much blood and guts for me to be able to say that, though.

The point is, even though it's flawed and far from perfect, it's a wonderfully dark and funny movie that will always have a special place in my heart.