Idle Hands is one of those horror movies that, despite objectively not being good, is great.
A teen bIack comedy, directed by Roger Corman protégé Rodman Flender (uncle of Timothée Chalamet, trivia fans!), it follows Anton (Devon Sawa), a slacker whose hand becomes possessed and starts killing people, even when he cuts it off. Assisted by the two friends he just murdered (Seth Green and Elden Henson) and his bassist neighbour (Jessica Alba), he tries to stop his disembodied hand from killing even more people. It’s... pretty silly.
Near the film’s climax, which takes place at a Halloween dance at Anton’s school, comes one of the greatest rock band cameos of all time. Pop-punk arena-fillers The Offspring play at the dance, first performing I Wanna Be Sedated, then Beheaded, then get brutally murdered, with the top of frontman Dexter Holland’s head being ripped clean off. This too, granted, is pretty silly, but it’s also a lot of fun.
Look!
Shall we vastly overthink this? Yes! Yes we shall.
At the time of filming, June 1998, The Offspring were preparing to head back into a recording studio after touring their record Ixnay On The Hombre. The album they subsequently made, Americana, would go on to be enormous, shifting ten million copies (almost as much as their breakthrough Smash, which remains the biggest-selling independent album of all time.
In order to become part of cinematic history too, he band spent three nights shooting their scene, filming from 9pm to 5am. In 2021, Dexter Holland shared his memories of the experience with NME: “That was a goof,” he related. “I was asked: ‘How would you like to play a rock band and get your head cut off in a movie?’ That ticked all the boxes for me! It got a lot of mileage. People still come up to me saying: ‘Dude, I saw you in Idle Hands. That was great when you got killed!”
Let's now take a moment to think about the song mostly featured here. I Wanna Be Sedated is, of course, a punk classic, one of the Ramones’ best-known tunes and a pretty straightforward song to learn, making it a popular choice for garage-level bands. Ramones were one of Holland’s favourite bands growing up (along with the Sex Pistols and local Cali heroes The Adolescents and Social Distortion), so it seems an obvious choice. The track was also featured on a Ramones tribute album.
But wait, there might be more to it than that.
Dexter Holland, pop-punk superstar, is also a scientist, suspending his PhD in molecular biology for several decades after the band took off, but successfully completing his studies in 2017. He would therefore know that a patient undergoing a craniotomy, in which the skull is opened to expose the brain — the closest medical procedure there is to the grotesque way he’s murdered here — cannot be put under a general anaesthetic. They can be partially sedated, but not fully.
Is there a deliberate irony going on here? A bit of gentle humour for a man of science? Who knows?
As well as the Ramones cover, the Offspring re-recorded the song Beheaded from their self-titled debut album for the movie’s soundtrack. The song mainly involves the narrator beheading everyone around him, rather than being beheaded himself as Holland sort-of nearly is in the movie. One line however, 'Wrap a towel around the bloody stump' fairly aptly describes a scene earlier in the film after Sawa cuts his hand off, although the film adds the extra step of cauterising the wound with an iron.
This was not Holland’s first scalping. Oh no. For years, The Offspring's frontman had long braids, which he cut off in favour of the hairstyle he has here. The Offspring recorded Ixnay On The Hombre from June to October 1996, and Holland was still sporting braids in late August when they played the Reading Festival. By 1997 and Ixnay’s release, his hair was short and spiky. Recording the two songs for Idle Hands was — assuming we’ve done all the maths right — the first time Holland went into a studio without his three-foot braids.
Now, stick with us here. There’s an argument to be made that you can tidily split the band’s career into two stages — phase one defined by Smash (no-frills punks who somehow sold millions), and phase two defined by Americana (a slicker, more MTV-friendly offering). Holland’s hairstyles kind of line up with this — is there something symbolic in his de-braiding, echoed in his Idle Hands scalping, representing the shedding of one for another? Or did he just, you know, get a haircut?
(There are rumours on the internet that the haircut came after an altercation with Axl Rose in which several of Holland’s braids were ripped out, necessitating a shorter haircut, but this seems to be a misinterpretation of Holland claiming Rose “ripped off”, i.e. copied, his braids.)
While guitarist Noodles, bassist Greg K. and drummer Ron Welty are credited as The Offspring, Holland’s official credit in Idle Hands is Band Lead Singer. He’s the only lead singer that The Offspring have ever had (which isn’t true for any other role in the band — there have been a few lineup changes over the years), so he’s probably playing himself, but you could probably argue that he wasn’t if you really wanted to.
If he is, of course, then the brain that gets exposed is a pretty impressive one filled with facts about molecular biology. The movie also features brief cameos from Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge and Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass, and there is an almost certainly untrue rumour — which seems to stem from a joke on the DVD commentary — that Ricky Martin appears as a barely-seen extra.
You want more shinfo? Well, alright. Keen-eyed viewers will be alert to the fact that Holland sports an AFI shirt. At the time of filming, AFI were signed to Nitro Records, founded by Holland and Greg K, and Holland provided backing vocals on their 1999 album Black Sails In The Sunset. The Offspring later covered the AFI song Totalimmortal for the soundtrack to another goofy comedy, 2000’s Me, Myself & Irene.
Now, the special effects here are, of course, disgusting. Idle Hands featured an incredibly impressive line-up on the effects team. Makeup legend Greg Cannom has five Oscars to his name and has worked on movies famed for their iconic makeup — The Mask, Hannibal, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — and hundreds more. Barry R. Koper has worked on pretty much every major horror and sci-fi franchise there is, from Hellraiser to Star Trek, while technician Jason Hamer did the hair on Everything Everywhere All At Once, surely a dream gig.
Rodman Flender was delighted with the band’s performance in the movie, as well as the extra boost it gave their movie.
“They did really well in the film," he told MTV at the time. “And Dexter Holland - I don't know if he knew what he was in for when he agreed to do this. He was in makeup a lot, he had to act, he had do a performance, and he delivered. He did a great job. [...] Then when Americana came out, a great album, and it was like number one, number two on the national charts. It was like a blessing. It was amazing how lucky we are [and] how great they are.”
So, let's recap: it's a great, silly moment in a great, silly film, the violent exposure of one of punk’s favourite brains and a goofy Halloween classic. Great times all round.
Grab some popcorn, we're going back in...
