Idle Hands might be the most 1999 horror movie ever made…
If the world ended tomorrow and future historians needed a time capsule of the 90s. I genuinely think you could save them a lot of work by just handing them a copy of Idle Hands.
Within about 90 minutes they’d have stoner slackers, baggy clothes, Jessica Alba, The Offspring playing a high school Halloween dance and a disembodied hand murdering people while honorary scream queen Devon Sawa tries to stop it by getting aggressively high.
There’s loads of films that feel distinctly ’90s, but Idle Hands is different because it doesn’t just look like it was made in 1999. It’s a true encapsulation of everything that was going on at the time, when Scream had made horror fashionable again, teen comedies were about to take over and when surprise butt groping was considered charming foreplay.
(I didn’t say it was all good).
Somehow, all of those things ended up in the same movie.
Idle Hands follows Anton Tobias, played by Devon Sawa, who’s such a hardcore stoner that it takes him a fair while to realise his parents have been brutally murdered in their house. Eventually he discovers that he’s actually responsible because his right hand has become possessed by the power of Satan, apparently because Big Red operates according to the old idea that idle hands are the Devil’s playground and there’s no better candidate than someone too lazy to scratch their own balls.
It’s incredibly stupid, and I fucking love it.
The film completely understands that it isn’t meant to be taken seriously, so instead it leans into being this bizarre combination of splatter horror and teenage slacker comedy. Devon Sawa actually talked about being obsessed with Bruce Campbell’s physical performance in Evil Dead II when he was younger, and when he auditioned he apparently started doing his own version of Ash fighting his possessed hand in front of the executives.
Unlike with Big Chin Bruce, the hand became much more central to the finished film, which makes perfect sense because Sawa throwing himself around a bedroom while essentially having a fist fight with his own arm is still some of the best stuff in it.
Sawa himself is also a ridiculously perfect lead for this particular point in time. A few years earlier he’d been the friendly ghost heartthrob from Casper, and within another year he’d be cheating death in Final Destination, but Idle Hands catches him right in the middle of that transition from teenage pin-up to horror mainstay.
Anton lives in teenage squalor where his main ambitions appear to involve watching television and finding the lowest effort way to obtain some dank kush. His friends Mick and Pnub are somehow even less motivated. Like, when Anton kills them both, they return from the dead largely because going to heaven sounded like too much work.
Also, this guy’s name is Pnub. Is that an actual name? Is there anyone out there called Pnub? I’ve been thinking about this way too much and it’s bordering on obsession. It’s also really funny that Pnub’s actor Elden Henson would go on to play Foggy in Daredevil.
Top 10 filmography.
Mick and Pnub also represent something I really miss from this era of horror, which is characters being allowed to be complete fucking idiots without the movie desperately needing to point out how knowingly clever it is. After dying, they basically carry on hanging around Anton’s house watching TV and smoking because why would they let decapitation and a bottle to the head change their lifestyle?
The film’s attitude towards weed is also a relic of the time. Anton isn’t treated like some dangerous delinquent spiralling into addiction, but the film isn’t making any serious point about marijuana either. Getting high is simply what these people do with their afternoons, to the extent that one of the movie’s biggest laughs involves Mick concluding that marijuana has once again rescued an otherwise disastrous situation.
Obviously the gradual legalisation and decriminalisaton of weed has broadly been a net positive, but it’s definitely diluted the caricature of stoner culture in media when Aunt Barbara can go down the dispensary.
That very specific late-’90s slacker character was absolutely everywhere for a while. The idea that the coolest possible response to adulthood was simply refusing to participate in it ran through movies, television and music, and Anton feels like the logical endpoint of that worldview because his laziness literally leaves enough empty space inside him for the Devil to move in.
Then there’s Jessica Alba as Molly, Anton’s neighbour and love interest, who appears to be living in an entirely different genre of movie about six feet away from him. Anton spends his days trying to work out whether his hand has murdered anyone recently while Molly seems remarkably relaxed about the increasingly deranged man rifling through her bush (leave it).
Alba was only seventeen during filming, and Idle Hands arrived right before Dark Angel made her properly famous, so she’s another one of those things that makes watching the movie now feel like a place in time. You get an actor who is about to become one of the defining celebrities of the following decade appearing in exactly the kind of teenage horror comedy that studios were throwing money at in the wake of Scream.
And the music might be where Idle Hands finally becomes so ‘90s it actually hurts. And boy, does it hurt so good.
The entire film is soaked in the amazing alternative music culture of the period, with a soundtrack that includes the likes of Rancid, Rob Zombie, Static-X and Sublime alongside a load of punk that sounds like somebody emptied my CD wallet directly into the editing suite.
The Offspring then turn up as the actual band playing the school Halloween dance, and I’ve never been more jealous of a school event before. The best I got was a DJ set from the guy who played Hodor in Game of Thrones. Still pretty cool, but it ain’t Pretty Fly for a White Guy.
They play a cover of The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated before Dexter Holland has his scalp ripped off by the now dismembered possessed hand, and if you’re paying particularly close attention he’s wearing an AFI shirt while it happens. That isn’t just some costume department coincidence either, because AFI were signed to Nitro Records, the label founded by Holland and fellow Offspring member Greg K, with Holland also contributing backing vocals to Black Sails in the Sunset. God I love AFI.
It’s an incredibly small detail, but it captures something I love about films from this era, where alternative bands and their surrounding scenes would just bleed into movies without everything feeling like a carefully negotiated cinematic universe or brand strategy.
There’s even a blink and you’ll miss it Tom DeLonge cameo as the Burger Jungle employee wearing a stupid hat, and complete with bleach blonde hair
So. 90s. It. Hurts.
The Halloween dance at the end is probably where the whole thing reaches critical mass because you’ve got a high school gym full of teenagers dressed like people who have just emerged from an MTV show, The Offspring are playing onstage and a severed hand is crawling through the ventilation system trying to drag Jessica Alba into Hell.
And the best part? None of this feels unusual within the world of the movie.
That’s perhaps the biggest reason Idle Hands works for me, because despite being obviously influenced by other horror films, it never feels embarrassed about being ridiculous. Director Rodman Flender has said that he wanted to find humour in the grotesque rather than making a straight parody, and you can see that throughout the movie because the gore itself is often surprisingly nasty even while everyone around it is behaving like they’re in a stoner comedy.
People get bottles buried in their heads and knitting needles driven through their skulls, while Dexter Holland gets relieved of most of his scalp in front of a gym full of teenagers. Pnub spends a significant chunk of the movie carrying his own severed head around after Anton decapitates him, but no one really seems to care that much.
That combination is a lot harder to pull off than Idle Hands makes it look.
Horror comedy is such a hard thing to get right, but when it’s done well it’s absolutely my favourite thing. A lot of horror comedies eventually decide whether they want the horror to matter or whether everything is basically a joke, whereas Idle Hands happily lets something genuinely disgusting happen and then immediately carries on as though everyone has merely suffered a minor inconvenience. Reviews at the time were pretty hostile to that mix, and the film still sits at only 18% on Rotten Tomatoes, although audiences have been considerably kinder to it over the years. And it’s great to see it get the love I truly think it deserves.
It also completely bombed, making only around $4.2 million against a reported $25 million budget, although part of that can be blamed on the worst possible timing. It opened in America on 30 April 1999, just ten days after the Columbine massacre. A violent comedy centred on teenagers and culminating at a high school isn’t the best thing to coincide with a serious conversation about violence in entertainment. Which put Idle Hands in an almost impossible position regardless of whether audiences would otherwise have embraced it.
That failure probably helped freeze the film in time.
There was never an Idle Hands 2 dragging Anton into the 2000s, nobody rebooted it with modern tech and sensibilities, and the original never became successful enough that someone had to sand off all its strange edges to turn it into a franchise. It just exists exactly as it was in 1999, with all the fashion and music that came with it preserved in place.
And that’s why I think calling Idle Hands the most ’90s horror movie ever made isn’t really an exaggeration.
It sits at the exact point where the teenage horror revival collided with the slacker comedy and alternative culture had become mainstream enough that The Offspring could perform at a fictional high school dance without anyone batting an eyelid.
Sure, there’s better horror movies from the ’90s and there’s maybe more important ones, but I can’t think of many that could only belong to their decade quite as completely as this.
You could keep remaking Scream, Candy Man and I Know What You Did Last Summer until the derivative cows come home.
But if you tried to make Idle Hands today, it wouldn’t have anything that made the original what it was. Heck, I hope it never gets remade.
That version of teenage culture doesn’t exist anymore, the music scene has moved on and the slacker archetype that Anton represents feels like something that belongs in a museum. Even the idea of spending an entire day completely out of sync with the modern (and largely toxic) idea of grindset culture. Plus you can’t have a stoner comedy with a weed vape!
Idle Hands didn’t set out to document the end of the 1990s, but that’s basically what it did.
And you know what? I’d give that hand a crisp high five for its efforts.
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Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
