Have you ever, in your life, thought to yourself, Self, I really wish they’d remake that Devon Sawa/Seth Green movie about a possessed hand? This just doesn’t seem like a common train of thought. But here we are: Variety reports that producer Jason Reitman is teaming up with Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk to remake Idle Hands. Wolfhard and Bryk are writing the film, and “are being eyed to direct” following the festival success of their film Hell of a Summer.
The original 1999 Idle Hands was directed by Rodman Flender, who has somewhat more recently directed episodes of On Becoming a God in Central Florida and Scream: The TV Series. Screenwriters Terri Hughes Burton and Ron Milbauer went on to some pretty well-known things: She’s written and produced Star Trek: Discovery and The 100; he’s a consulting producer on The Handmaid‘s Tale and also The 100.
Idle Hands was rather less popular. It made $1.8 million on opening weekend (almost $19 million less than the truly terrible Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta-Jones film Entrapment), and, according to Box Office Mojo, grossed barely more than $4 million total. It starred Sawa, Green, a very young Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), Jessica Alba, Vivica A. Fox, and Jack Noseworthy, which is truly a name I haven’t heard in years.
It was a stoner comedy about a teenager whose hand gets possessed. Some of the people it murders get turned into zombies. There is also a druidic priestess and, if the Wikipedia page is to be believed, some guardian angels. The Offspring song “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” appears in the trailer, and the band appears in the movie; naturally, someone on the internet has written “A needlessly deep dive into The Offspring’s cameo in cult horror film Idle Hands” (their title, not my editorializing). My favorite of the many bad reviews of the movie notes, “Its mixture of slapstick humour and gore — produced by the flying fingers — gives new meaning to the phrase digital effects.”
As Alex Brown writes in their appreciation of campy teen slasher flicks, “Hating on Idle Hands or Cherry Falls for being terrible movies is easy, but completely misses the point that they’re supposed to be terrible.”
So obviously we can’t leave perfect trash alone and instead must give it a remake. No casting or production timeline has been announced.
