The U.S. Government Tried to Ban the Original ‘Idle Hands’
Hollywood has been revisiting a lot of ‘90s teen horror franchises lately, from the new Scream movies, to the I Know What You Did Last Summer TV show, to the Jurassic World series that clearly took its cues from the Denise Richards classic Tammy and the T-Rex.
Now it’s just been announced that Idle Hands is getting a remake (even though it was basically already a remake of that one scene from Army of Darkness).
The new Idle Hands is penned by Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard (of Stranger Things fame), and it will be produced by Jason Reitman. Presumably, a story about demonic possession will be a pleasant change of pace for Reitman after the hellish nightmare that is Saturday Night Live’s backstage politics.
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But while Idle Hands is considered a remake-worthy cult favorite today, it was a major bomb at the time, owing to a dumb controversy that stemmed from one of America’s most famous tragedies.
The movie hit theaters on April 30, 1999, just 10 days after the Columbine High School shooting. In the aftermath of the horrific events in Littleton, Colorado, the American government responded by immediately passing sensible gun control laws t— No, wait, they baselessly blamed pop-culture.
In addition to several movies, TV shows, albums and video games that were already widely available, Idle Hands was singled out as a potential cause of teenage violence, even despite the fact that it hadn’t been released yet. While speaking at a bipartisan press press event, Senator Joe Lieberman (who passed away earlier this year) and Senator John McCain urged President Bill Clinton “to hold a summit with media executives to discuss the problem of violence in the media.”
Lieberman discussed the controversial Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers, then brought up Idle Hands. Due to the proximity of its release date, Lieberman argued that the horror comedy should be the first casualty of a stricter moral code for popular entertainment. He even went so far as to suggest that the studio behind the film should scrap it altogether. “A sensible place to start this self-regulation, this self-control, would be for Sony to pull back a new movie that I gather it’s set to release this week called Idle Hands,” Lieberman stated. “By all reports, another grossly violent film targeted at teens that uses killing as a form of comic relief.”
The statement worked to some extent. Clinton held a summit on media violence, and hardly anybody went to see Idle Hands. While it was ultimately released, some Colorado theaters opted not to screen it, and the film’s premiere was canceled.
The director of the film, Rodman Flender, later claimed that the Senators “scapegoated” the film, but admitted that it was terrible timing. “And that’s not tragic for the movie,” Flender rightly pointed out. “That’s tragic for all those involved and to the families and the people killed and wounded and affected by that massacre.”
While there’s obviously nothing funny about the tragedy that incited the government’s ill-informed outrage, it’s pretty amusing that the phrase “A penis is pulled off in the new alleged comedy Idle Hands” appears in an official Congressional Record.
