Idle Hands comes as unfortunate proof that there is no escaping context.
At some other time or place, Idle Hands would be just another bad teen comedy, one that happened to use gory murder as its theme.
But against the backdrop of the Colorado high school murders the film is ghastly.
Of course, the makers of this movie did not foresee the juxtaposition of their film with the tragedy. Even without a tragedy to cast Idle Hands as the depth of tastelessness, the film is filled with grisly violence, blood, death and torture, all treated ineptly as comic fodder.
True, there is such a thing as mordant satire, and the horror has been turned into skillful comedy before (The Addams Family, Beetlejuice, Heathers). But it takes a far sharper crew than director Rodman Flender and writers Terri Hughes and Ron Milbauer to pull off the excruciating balancing act this movie demands. The attempts to extract comedy from this grim raw material are leaden, blood-soaked disasters.
I actually felt bad for the talented young cast — Devon Sawa, Seth Green, Elden Henson — who work hard and show some natural charm in spite of the story.
But with the savagery of Littleton, Colo., still raw and real, can you make yourself laugh at the movie’s scene of weeping students laying flowers at a memorial for slain teen-agers? Can you listen to the movie’s news reports about a serial killer, or comments like ‘‘Our little town is in the national spotlight’’ without feeling a sick twist in your gut? Do you want to?
When acts of brutality are presented with the filmmakers’ command to laugh, must you laugh?
Someone always will. The back row of the theater where I saw this film (with a sparse preview crowd) contained one noisy specimen who yelped at every spurt of blood. His laughter sounded phony, as if he, like the filmmakers, were working overtime to prove that ordinary human feeling was no match for his cynical sense of humor.
Of course, he’s free to assume that role. That’s just the point. He decided what he wants to be. We all decide. We define ourselves by our choices, including what we choose to accept as ‘‘entertainment.’’
Personally, I could not forget the real world while I watched Idle Hands. And nothing in this movie justified the effort to try.
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