REVIEW: Idle Hands (1999)

After my last few reviews involved a psychic killer penis, a hungry, vengeful vagina and man-eating boobs, I was really wondering where I could possibly go from there…I mean, these are really hard to top. So what am I left with to end this little saga on? A half-assed stoner comedy/horror about a kid whose hand is possessed by the devil? And it’s directed by that idiot who made The Unborn and starring the doofus from the first Final Destination movie?! Seriously, how does that even compare?

Director: Rodman Flender

Starring: Devon Sawa, Jessica Alba

IMDb

It doesn’t. It doesn’t at all. In fact, it leaves so little of an impact that I’m pretty much grasping for straws even trying to review it. This movie is the equivalent of the actual real life stoners who do nothing but sit around on their asses all day eating potato chips – there is no cleverness or wit at all to be found here. So let’s fire up the fumes of reviewing and get this stinker over with before our brain cells turn to mush.

We start off with an overly long scene of a middle aged couple in bed talking about how their idiot son doesn’t help them with Halloween decorations and just sits around doing nothing all day. They’re about to go to bed and turn off the light when they see blue neon writing on the ceiling telling them to look under the bed. How did that get on the ceiling? Never explained…apparently the killer just utilizes ladders to their full potential.

"Honey, did you let a serial killer into the house AGAIN? I'm gonna freakin' kill you for this..."

And for that matter, why bother writing anything on the ceiling to warn his victims in the first place? He’s just giving them more time to escape or foil his plans unknowingly. Imagine if he did that to a house where the people went out all night and partied, never turning off the lights or seeing anything…he’d just be sitting under the bed waiting for hours, for no reason. What a dumbass. I wouldn’t trust this guy to be the star of my slasher movie…

Then the mother is killed off while apparently, the father is axed offscreen, because offscreen deaths are just terrifying when you can’t see them and don’t know what happened! The next day we meet their son Anton, played by future Final Destination survivor Devon Sawa. I actually think he seems to have more fun in this than his later flop…at least here he gets to go all Keanu Reeves and make bug-eyed over the top stoner expressions.

He keeps this expression ALL. THROUGHOUT. THE MOVIE. Seriously, kid, maybe it's time for you to take a visit to Narcotics Anonymous!

We also meet his two buddies Mick and Pnub, played by Seth Green and Elden Henson, neither of whom were sober during the filming of this, I’m sure…they sit around all day smoking and eating cheese balls and chips. They throw Anton’s cat out a window for some reason and then his hand, which has been possessed by the devil and moves on its own now, forces him to pick up the fallen journal of hot chick Molly (Jessica Alba, who he has a crush on) and give it back to her. She ends up starting a relationship with him and somehow they have really hot sex in her room later on:

Uh, yeah, no. Doesn't happen. Not buying it. Definitely not.

His hand is all over her, groping and everything – luckily he found the one girl in the universe who wouldn’t just throw him out the second he started with that shit. She’s so stupid she actually just sees everything he’s doing as charmingly delightful and sexy…in reality he acts like a spaz and does crazy things for no reason. Are her standards really so low? Maybe the weed fumes emanating off him just infected her too somehow.

But OK, so I guess he eventually discovers that his parents are dead, what, 30 minutes into the damn movie? This is really supposed to be our hero? Even Bill and Ted would be like “dude, you’re really an oblivious ass!” His hand then somehow forces him to murder Mick and Pnub with broken beer bottles, so he buries them in his backyard and gives a eulogy speech that even a four year old could do better.

Somehow, Mick and Pnub come back to life – because “the gates of Heaven were too far away.” I’m so glad this movie affirms a positive Christian agenda and the idea of Heaven existing…if only it actually elaborated on that, we might have a good joke. But nope. Just like in Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein, the characters react to these two becoming undead zombies like it’s nothing to worry about at all, never even questioning it. I know marijuana can be pretty potent, but c’mon. It’s ZOMBIES. If this had been made ten years later, the movie would have just stopped right here and gone into full Zombieland mode…maybe that would’ve been better actually.

ZOMBIES!!!! Just regular every day stuff when you're high.

But no, instead we're just stuck with bullshit devil-possessed hand story with stupid stoner characters. Like this one scene where he’s facing down these two cops who are trying to arrest him; he’s knitting because, you know, “idle hands do the devil’s work,” and knitting is the first thing he can think of just because the movie thinks it’s funny…and he can’t stop knitting because otherwise his hands will kill the cops. So they start screaming at each other and chaos breaks out and it’s really, really unfunny – like, to extremes only a bad comedy film can reach. I mean, did they have any jokes? Where's the humor? You have a potentially funny situation, movie, but the jokes...are just not here. Instead all we get is dumbass slapstick. Because, you know, that's the best kind of comedy, right? Wrong.

Then Anton gets the brilliant idea to cut off his own hand, and after he does that, he barely feels anything at all, and is able to continue to going on like he just got a paper cut. I guess the joke is that he’s so high, he didn’t even feel the pain, but given this movie’s track record for obliviousness, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just lazy writing. After that, the severed hand can still move and now goes on a warpath to kill Jessica Alba because…….because.

Chalk up one more for the goofy horror facial expression club...

Oh, and did I mention there’s another plotline in this movie involving this druid woman who apparently put together that because a thread of murders forms some kind of pentagram shape in which Anton’s town is at the middle, that means the devil has possessed someone and is about to do something evil. She also somehow deduces that he’s possessed the laziest slacker around – dunno how, or how that pentagram thing works for that matter, but I guess that’s because I’m not high as a kite.

And really? We’re supposed to take this five-minute plotline seriously at all? Even when the character is so stupid that she runs out in front of a big truck backing out of a driveway when she could easily just run alongside it? Yeah, real genius, cool character you got there, movie…

"Hur hur hur, I love running in front of random cars when they're backing out! Almost as much as I love sticking my tongue in electrical sockets!"

At the school while trying to kill Jessica Alba’s character, the hand of course can’t just, you know, DO THAT RIGHT AWAY. No, it first kills a principal who is in the middle of a phone sex hotline call in his office…random…and then the lead singer of a band. Both of these scenes are overly long, pointless and add absolutely nothing to the film.

Meanwhile, the zombified Mick and Pnub hit on girls at the dance who can’t tell they’re dead, because you know, being dead wouldn’t make your BO off the charts or anything…good thing this movie takes place at Halloween, or else everything in it would completely fall apart. Lazy screenwriting 101, just throw everything under the bus with a cheap holiday gag.

Uh, yeah, no. Doesn't happen. Not buying it. Definitely not...and seriously, wouldn't anyone smell the stench of ROTTING DEATH on these two peons?

Then Jessica Alba and her random friend we didn’t know until five minutes ago escape the hand by crawling up into an air vent; yes, crawling up into an air vent. Couldn’t just escape on foot from the tiny hand that’s about 1/15^th the size of you, could you? I guess that would make too much sense. They come across a giant fan and somehow stop its blades just by jamming them with one of their high heels. Uh, yeah, no. In real life that thing would be shredded to a cinder…oh, why am I even bothering anymore?

The hand kills the friend and kidnaps Alba, tying her in a full-body bind to the top of a car…yeah, how did that little hand subdue her that much without her resisting? It just makes no sense. You’d have to be a total pansy to let a hand tie you up that much! Anton and friends come in and rip her dress off leaving her in a sort of bikini…OK. It is pretty hot I guess.

Let's be honest, a mostly naked Jessica Alba tied to a car is the only reason any of you ever watched this film.

After that, they somehow stop the car by smoking weed through a giant car engine thing – once a burnout loser, always a burnout loser, I guess. Then they kill the hand by throwing a knife at it; yes, that’s really all it took to kill the demonic hand that could subdue a fully grown human being and tie her down to a car roof. What a letdown. I haven’t been this disappointed since my hopes of this turning out as a good movie died in the first three minutes of the film!

Idle Hands just sucks. The jokes are terribly unfunny, and you won’t laugh even once. The characters are all wastes of perfectly good script paper that could have been used to roll more joints. The plot is a mess of stupidity that seems to think it can get by simply because its audience is presumably too high to see what a godawful piece of hack work it really is. And really, that’s all it comes down to with Idle Hands. It’s not the worst ever, but really, how much less effort could you put into a movie than the makers of this one did? This is crap made for a bunch of stoner morons and nothing more.

None of the images in this review belong to me. They belong to their original owners. I got them off of the YouTube free movie.

Review: Endure (2010) TH

One life for another

A bound and gagged woman in central Florida is driven to an out of reach location in the middle of the night by a stranger and has her photograph taken as she's tied against a tree in the woods. Leaving her alive and alone, the man drives off and somewhere on his trip suddenly has a deer go through his windshield killing him. An experienced detective named Emory Lane (Judd Nelson)--who's at home with his terminally ill wife Sirena (Joey Lauren Adams)--is called out to what initially looks like a normal car wreck but because there is a photograph, blood and handcuff keys the police want to look further into the suspicious evidence that might point to foul play.

A young, former west coast detective named Zeth Arnold (Deven Sawa) is called in as an apprentice in account of Lane being tied up in his personal life. They frequently butt heads as Arnold is over-confident and has a somewhat brash way of handling the case than the by-the-book veteran. Judd Nelson plays the character somewhat reserved and contemplative to the point of appearing detached. His character has trust issues, but gives some leeway as he can't be two places at once. Devon Sawa delivers some dry banter and his character speaks what's on his mind, which comes off as cocky but might actually have something to offer under that rookie demeanor.

There are hundreds of miles of roadway and five hundred thousand acres of swamp to comb through, so the detectives start with what they know. They question the dead man named Macey's neighbors, who explain that he was a loner, not right in the head and doesn't have any living relatives that he keeps in touch with. The girl is identified as Daphne (Clare Kramer) by a friend who said she just talked to her last night but is currently missing. A profiler is called in and suggests that there might be an accomplice that he seeks approval from. Taking cues from John Lithgow in "Dexter" of who you wouldn't expect, Tom Arnold brings a good-guy face to his role as Simon but makes you think twice about what's underneath. From one revelation to the next the detectives uncover an underground network, which gives them more to contend with to save the young woman's life before it's too late.

This is a gradually paced drama about searching for answers. It also deals with saving a life and watching one depart. Lane's wife is cooped up with nowhere to go, and he wants to stay but has everywhere to be; though he eventually uses the time away to push aside his feelings and in an odd sense cope. What a viewer gets: a basic story about human suffering that isn't confusing or muddled with layer upon layer of twists as it keeps it conventional as far as crime plots go. This is more held back than the typical shoot-'em-up-warrantless-bustin'-down-the-door-alcoholic features you normally see in the genre. This injects some feelings and leaves ample room open for the viewer's own interpretations, as well as the actions and motivations in the movie seem reasonable.

The major issue with "Endure" is it doesn't always capitalize on its own story line due to trying to meld two different subplots and be thoroughly realistic while at it. This isn't going for the usual cinematic experience, as the editing and cinematography are restrained, the dialogue is close enough to how real people speak and the situation isn't glamorized or sensationalized. There's drama to be had here though the delivery felt somewhat flat and the characters didn't end up being as memorable as they could have. At times it comes across as cut and dry, even when a piece of evidence is unraveled to get closer to finding the victim while she's still alive. Not until the latter portion is there much in the way of being gripping. There's no sense in over-dramatizing the story like so many do and force it, but the atmosphere feels calm and relaxed to the point of being dozy and less important than it should be, as the dire circumstances at hand don't always have the capability of captivating one's undivided attention for the then and now.

Director: Joe O'Brien
Starring: Judd Nelson, Devon Sawa, Joey Lauren Adams, Tom Arnold, Clare Kramer
Website: IMDB

Review: Final Destination (2000)

Director: James Wong

Starring: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195714/

In the year 2000, there was a movie made that was groundbreaking, original, horrifying, intelligent and mature. This…was not that movie.

Final Destination begins with a rich white kid named Alex going on a plane trip to France for his high school graduation. And already I’m wondering, what kind of high school sends their students to France as a graduation present? Do they attend the Richy McRichRich School for Rich Kids? Caucasian Meadows High? Alex tells his mom not to remove the tag on the briefcase because he believes it’s good luck. You'd think this would have some significance in the movie, but nope. It's just setting up how much of an unmitigated pussy our main character is. Seriously, the kid's a wimp. The fact that he does ANYTHING heroic in this movie at all is a testament to the very convenient writing more than any actual development. Ugh.

Then through some home-video-style tracking shots of his room in the dark, the camera arrives on the alarm clock, which flashes 1:00, which is the movie's cue to transition to the flight departure board at the airport flashing a similar number. This poor directing brought to you by the same guy who made Dragonball Evolution! The graduating class is made up of all white kids, all interchangeable from one another – they're identical balls of disposable dough and hair gel, each with the same crass under-knowledge of French and each with parents who can buy them an SUV in the blink of an eye. Alex gets handed some pamphlet about death not being the end, and this gets him spooked at the scaaaary coincidence of the flight time being the same number as his birthday (9:25) and the shutters of the flight departure board moving. Creepy! Oh, wait…no it isn’t.

Then some kid comes up to him and says, “Alex, let’s go take a shit.” His reasoning is that hot girls might not like them if they take a shit on the airplane.

…You really don’t want me to be interested in this movie at all, do you? Did I mention the same director made Dragonball Evolution? I can't decide which one is less mature!

They board the plane where the friend who was worried about girls not liking him tells those same girls that he has a urinary tract infection and can’t switch seats with them. Real counter-productive there, guy!

"Help! This movie is simply way too hammy and clichéd!" 

Alex gives up his seat for the two girls and then the plane blows up horrifically. Oh, wait, no; it was a dream. Then he goes fucking nuts and starts screaming about how the plane is going to blow up. He gets in a fight with this kid named Carter, who I guess takes it really personally when people act crazy, and they get taken off the plane along with a teacher, Carter’s girlfriend, Alex’s friend Tod, this one kid who was in the bathroom at the time, and a random girl. They sit around for a while when the plane actually does blow up after all. Oops.

YOU DON'T FUCK WITH THIS FACE! This is his Mean Face. Or his 'taking a shit' face...I forget which.

They all get interrogated by the FBI and then go home to wallow in depression. Everyone pretty much treats Alex like dirt because he had this unexplained vision and yet nobody really seems too interested – until later, that is, when people start dying. Yeah. Don’t do anything logical like have him see a counselor about his problems or anything. That would make too much fucking sense.

At the memorial event for all the dead students, Carter gets in another fight with Alex for no reason (because he has nothing better to do, I guess) and that random girl, whose name is Clear Rivers, gives him a flower for saving her life. Clear Rivers? That’s a weird fucking name. What, was she one of those Native American children whose names are more like nature catalog descriptions? Maybe she’ll name her son Muddy Puddles. Or Sharp Rocks. The possibilities are endless.

Oh, and while I’m at it, one of the kids is named Billy Hitchcock. Yeah, because when I think of this movie, I’m going to think of Alfred Hitchcock’s name now because you did that. Clearly the resemblance between this movie and Hitchcock’s classic, inventive thrillers is striking! I’m just shocked.

Then we see Tod on the toilet again. Because you didn’t get enough of that the first time, you get to see it again. Seriously, how many movie characters get shown taking a shit twice in the same movie? After that, Tod gets killed when some water in his bathroom comes to life and makes him trip into the shower where he somehow strangles himself to death. Yeah, can’t make this up, people. It’s like if MacGuyver constructed a death trap. It’s just insane! Everyone of course dismisses it as suicide, and when a shredded up newspaper gives Alex a clue – they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here – he rushes over and gets arrested. The detectives laugh at him when he tells them about his vision and then just let him go.

Don't even ask how this happened; the writers don't know either!

So then Alex hooks up with Clear, and he tells her that he thinks that Death is trying to kill them off because they didn’t get killed when they were ‘supposed to’ in the plane crash. Like Death is a serial killer that actually chases after people in a black cloak with a scythe. Is this movie making you dumber yet? Pause the movie now just in case, and do a few basic math problems to exercise that big brain of yours which probably isn’t getting a lot of work out of a movie like this.

Done? OK. They go and break into the funeral home where they find…the Candyman! AHHHH!

He tells them that Death is coming for all of them. How does he know this? Never revealed. What is he doing creeping around the funeral home in the middle of the night? Not answered. Why is he even in this movie? Because they didn’t have any other black people in the movie. Or just because their quota for ‘wasted horror actor potential’ had not yet been filled, and they decided that Tony Todd was a seasoned veteran of that kind of thing. Either one works – pick and choose your own explanation! Get creative. He never shows up in the movie again anyway, so whatever you pick will be fine and dandy!

So then Alex goes home and sits around in his room some more trying to find – oh, God – a pattern for how Death is killing everyone off. A fucking pattern! Are you for real? It’s not like this is a scavenger hunt. You don’t get a prize for jumping through the most hoops and figuring out the big riddle. Well, these kids get to stay alive, I guess; but that’s not a reward for any of the rest of us watching this shitfest! And again, it’s like they’re trying to say he’s a physical bogeyman running around going OOGA BOOGA BOOGA!

Alex talks to Clear about it at a random, generic intersection where by COINCIDENCE everyone else who survived the plane disaster shows up, too! The teacher is coming out of a store, Little Billy Hitchcock is riding his bike down the street and he almost gets run over by Carter and his girlfriend Terry, or something like that. Carter decides to pick a fight with Alex for no reason at all, literally, and Terry stands conveniently in the middle of the street to tell everyone to stop fighting. Or else they’ll all be dead.

That’s when the bus comes out of nowhere and hits her. Even though in broad daylight it should have seen her from a mile away and slowed down, this is the movie’s most famous scene, so I guess I’m just supposed to shut up and deal with it.

Then we get the revelation that the teacher is next to die. She’s alone in her house moping to some random friend on the phone about how her life sucks now when a computer blows up for no reason and slits her throat. Then she falls to the floor as her house catches fire, where a kitchen knife falls at the PERFECT ANGLE to stab her in the stomach and kill her. Excuse me while I laugh uncontrollablAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Okay, I’m done. All this right before Alex arrives and picks up the knife, putting his prints on it and setting him up to look like the murderer. Good job, dumbass; good job!

Tom and Jerry would have been proud. So would most of the ACME corporation, I think.

Now he’s on the run! The police are after him and he’s got to shack up with the other survivors and BE A REBEL! They drive around in Carter’s car until Carter goes nuts and tries to kill himself on some train tracks. Alex pulls him out, but then Billy gets all huffy about how Carter is next and he doesn’t want to be around him, like it’s contagious. Just like before with that Terry girl getting hit by the bus, Billy stands in exactly the right spot and gets decapitated by the train right at that very moment. OH. HOW. CONVENIENT.

So then Alex, holed up in a cabin all alone and talking to himself like a crazy person, realizes that Clear is actually the next to die! He rushes to her house, which is guarded by the cops who are looking for him, where he finds her trapped in her car, victim to a million and one failed Looney Tunes traps. Yes, even Tom and Jerry wouldn’t do these traps, unfunny as they are…damn, I really want to finish this review; if you’ve seen the movie you know how dull it is. How little surprises can you have in a movie? Both characters live, they go to Paris with Carter for some reason (I guess he’s a friend all the sudden…) and then Carter dies because he saves Alex from dying. Yeah. The movie ends on the death of a character nobody liked and who barely did anything throughout the film but act like a whiny little pussy. SURPRISED?

Whew, this was an annoying one. I mean, come on; this is pretty much a Saturday morning cartoon, not a horror movie! Final Destination embodies pretty much everything wrong with a lot of these late 90s and early-mid 2000s films that were just so lame. That’s really the core of it. Lame writing, lame acting, lame directing, lame stories…just lame ass movies in general. This is more of a comedy than a horror movie, and if you think it’s scary, I have another horror series that might chill you to the bone, too:

Disclaimer: I actually think Goosebumps is much cooler than this movie.

That about sums it up. Don’t watch this crap, it sucks. The end.

None of these images are mine. I took them from other people. I did not create them.