Trailer
Plot summary
Anton Tobias lives in a California suburb with his parents and spends his days smoking weed, watching television and thinking about Molly, the punk rock girl across the street. Two days before Halloween, an unseen attacker kills his parents in their home. Anton finds the bodies the next night and brings his friends Mick and Pnub to look at them, and together they work out that his right hand is the thing doing the killing. The hand moves when it wants and Anton cannot hold it back. Debi LeCure, a druidic high priestess, has been tracking the spirit behind killings like these around the country.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Idle Hands (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Idle Hands opened the same month as the Columbine High School massacre, so distributor Columbia weighed a delay, canceled the premiere, and many theaters, especially in Colorado, chose not to screen it. Senator Joe Lieberman attacked it in Congress as "another grossly violent film targeted at teens that uses killing as a form of comic relief".
- The film's planned climax was an elaborate swimming pool sequence with a large pool model, a "wall of hands" and a "hell hole", but post-viewing tests found the ending clashed with the film's tone. A shop class sequence replaced it, pushing the release back several months.
- Idle Hands was parodied in the Robot Chicken sketch "Idle Nuts", which keeps the same plot but swaps the possessed hand for possessed testicles. Seth Green, who played Mick in the film, is an executive producer and co-creator of Robot Chicken.
- Four songs that appear on the Idle Hands soundtrack album are never heard in the film: "Enthused" by Blink-182, "Mama Said Knock You Out" by The Waking Hours, "Bleeding Boy" by Disappointment Incorporated and "My Girlfriend's Dead" by The Vandals.
