In short: Idle Hands (1999)

Teenage stoner Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa) has a little problem: a demon in the habit of possessing the body of the laziest sod it can find has taken possession of one of his hands, murdering people – including his parents but don’t you worry our hero will be more interested in his dating life than dead close relatives – while he’s sleeping the sleep of the stoned. Soon, his best stoner friends Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) are dead too but return as undead because they couldn’t be bothered to step into the light, sometimes assisting Anton in a fight better left to the Ashs of this world. On the plus side, the whole affair also finally scores Anton the sexual attention of his big crush, neighbour Molly (Jessica Alba).

The teenage horror comedy is an intriguing little sub-genre, seeing how it has the potential to dig into elements of your usual coming-of-age stories from a different perspective. In reality, it’s the same mix of stoner jokes and underdeveloped female characters as most of the – typically guy-centric – non-horror teen comedies feature, just with more blood. That doesn’t mean these films are necessary all not worth watching: they just practically never do anything that’s even mildly deep or really interesting. Case in point is Rodman Flender’s Idle Hands with actors playing characters very much like the ones they play in all other teen comedies, and a romance that is pure teenage male wishfulfilment and only suggests Jessica Alba’s character to have anything even vaguely amounting to agency (or truthfully, a brain) when she’s turning into something of a badass for five minutes just before the script turns her into the prize to be rescued by Devon Sawa’s dubious prince completely.

However, if you’re okay with the total lack of depth, empathy and originality the film displays, there are some redeeming qualities to it: while Sawa isn’t a Bruce Campbell (or even a Michael Cain) in the hand fighting business he displays good comic timing and is generally funny in the splatstick lite sequences the film features, as is most of the rest of the cast in one way or the other. Well, there’s Seth Green, but my (probably unfair) complete antipathy to his apathetic acting style isn’t the problem of my imaginary readers (or his). On the feminist side, Vivica A. Fox’s demon hunter character does have a bit more to do than Alba, though her scenes usually feel like filler more than anything else.


And while most of the humour is pretty misanthropic and low-brow, the jokes tend to be timed well enough they still work on a guy like me who isn’t at all into this style of humour.

Three Films Make A Post: They Thought They Were Alone

Iron Man 2 (2010): No wonder mainstream critics looked less favourably on Jon Favreau's second Iron Man movie than they did on the first one. Instead of going in the direction of the serious and the dark (and we all know only the serious and the dark can be good, unless your making comedies about neurotic New Yorkers not featuring any explosions), Favreau goes on an all-out binge of the silly and the slightly to heavily ridiculous while trying to tell about half a dozen stories at once without including much of an actual plot holding them together. Not surprisingly, this leads to a highly distractible film that is lacking in coherence and dramatic power and prefers spending its time on play and having (often dumb) fun with whatever it can get its hands on.

Fortunately, I do like the silly and the ridiculous parts of superhero fiction as much as I do the more serious interpretations of the concept, and approve of a director spending ridiculous amounts of big company media money on playing around, so I had just about as much fun with the film as Favreau, Downey and the gang seem to have had.

Machete (2010): I know, as someone mostly specializing in cult movies, I am required by law to look down on the efforts of people like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino mining everyone's favourite cult movies for fun, art and profit, and to mumble some stuff about "stealing" from "my genre" that has nothing whatsoever to do with my understanding of the way cultural products feed on other cultural products or - more specifically - the way classic exploitation movies themselves have been built from other people's ideas and the lust for money (which of course doesn't say anything about their qualities as art or entertainment).

Fortunately, I don't care about that law, and have enjoyed nearly anything Rodriguez (or Tarantino) has ever made. Machete is no exception to that rule. As in Favreau's movie, there's a lot of wallowing in silliness on screen here too, but also a whole bunch of silly/cool pretend violence, a bit of sledgehammer political satire, Steven Seagal actually moving and speaking his own lines (though he does both with the expected problems), mainstream Hollywood actresses not daring to undress, and Danny Trejo doing what Danny Trejo does best. It's all in good fun; most of the time, Machete is a lot of fun.

Spirited Killer 3 (or whatever it is actually called, though this might actually be the spiritual sequel to what usually goes under the name of Spirited Killer 2; 199x): Two groups of people (one Japanese, the other Chinese) are tromping through a well-known patch of Thai jungle in search of a black crane's egg. Alas, an evil shaman played by Panna Rittikrai (who else?), has called dibs on the egg and sets his undead servants (including two ninjas who just love to shout "Nin-nin-nin-nin-ja!") on them. Only when the Japanese, the Chinese and the Thai people of a nearby village unite and team-up with a girl with demonic blood (don't ask) can they hinder the bad guy from using the egg for world domination.

Unfortunately, what sounds like a perfectly awesome piece of weird fu cinema gets dragged down into that very particular brand of Thai slapstick humour that makes me want to bash my own head in when I have to witness it. Not even the ninja or a gut-munching old woman are enough to alleviate the pain of dozens of sped-up chase scenes and pratfalling. Of course, not everyone is as allergic to this sort of thing as I am, so you (yes, YOU!) might well like it.

 

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