Few films have explored the terrifying notion of a possessed appendage. The Crawling Hand was entirely centered around the disembodied hand of a dead astronaut being controlled by an alien consciousness. In Evil Dead 2, Ash dueled with his own hand that had been infected by evil spirits. And, in 1999, audiences were introduced to the next evolution of the demonic limb in the horror comedy Idle Hands. Devon Sawa plays the improbably named Anton Tobias, the epitome of the stoned, high-school slacker that were so very prevalent throughout the nineties. The local news is buzzing with unsolved murders, but this is the least of Anton’s worries, as he is out of weed. He visits his friends Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) who convince him to smoke a mixture of oregano and nutmeg. Anyway, after all this dumb-fuckery, Anton discovers the bodies of his own parents, then murders Mick with a broken bottle and Pnub with a circular saw blade. Anton is horrified that his own right hand is commuting the acts of its own volition. As he tries to calm himself down with some television, he flings his pet cat out the window and across the street. While trying to locate his frazzled feline, he runs into his neighbor and long time crush Molly (Jessica Alba) and somehow manages to strike up a romance with her in spite of his murderous hand trying to attack her. He agrees to go to their school’s Halloween dance as her date, but first Anton must clean up the mess of corpses he has at home.
During all of this, Vivica A. Fox as the druidic priestess Debi LeCure has been investigating murder cases that she believes are related to demonic possession. While marking out locations on a map, she finds the murders have been in places that form a giant pentagram over the area. She heads to Anton’s neighborhood, where she hypothesizes that this evil spirit will choose a soul to take back to hell with it. Meanwhile, Anton had spent the rest of the day burying his mother, father, and two stoner buddies in the back yard. But, it would appear that Mick and Pnub are not finished quite ready to leave, as their bodies rise from the dead. They both explain that passing into the afterlife was simply too much work, and they would rather hang around Anton’s house and get high. Anton decides that he no longer wants to be host to a killer limb, and cuts his own hand off. Unfortunately, the hand is still possessed, and now much harder to keep track of. Horror comedy is probably one of the hardest genres for a writer and director to balance correctly. In the case this film, the comedy is pretty good with our pot-head three amigos of Sawa, Green, and Henson. They play off of each other pretty well and have a genuine chemistry that is fun to watch. The problem comes in the horror elements of the movie. Early on, when the evil hand is still attached to Anton, the notion of his character committing grizzly acts of violence and not having any way to stop himself is a fairly disturbing idea. The monster is part of him, so anything it does, Anton is also partly responsible. Once the hand is removed, however, it becomes a much less interesting concept. It’s hard to make such a small monster threatening in any believable way without it being part of a swarm. I have the same problem with Chucky from the Child’s Play movies. Any healthy adult could take such a small attacker and punt it across the yard with little effort.
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