Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Anton is a cheerful but exceedingly non-ambitious 17-year-old stoner who lives to stay buzzed, watch TV, and moon over Molly, the beautiful girl who lives next door. However, it turns out that the old cliché about idle hands being the devil's playground has a kernel of truth after all.
Idle Hands is a late-90s horror-comedy cult curiosity that blends stoner comedy with possession horror in a reasonably fun way, but it never fully commits to either genre. The plot is thin and meandering — the 'idle hands' premise is clever as a hook but barely sustains a feature runtime, with the third act becoming particularly loose and unfocused. Acting is serviceable; Devon Sawa is likable enough, and Seth Green and Elden Henson steal scenes as the undead best friends, giving the film most of its charm. Cinematography is functional genre work, nothing particularly stylish or memorable for the era. Novelty gets a modest bump for the specific mashup of slacker stoner culture with demonic possession horror — it's a reasonably distinctive B-movie pitch that wasn't really done this way before or since. The ending is rushed and unsatisfying, wrapping up the demonic threat in a perfunctory way that doesn't pay off the setup comedically or dramatically.