Would it indicate that you can be typecast to appear in horror comedies?
That might be the case for Sean Whalen, who appeared in the first movie I watched, The People Under the Stairs, and now follows that up with Thursday night's viewing, Idle Hands.
Who is Sean Whalen?
He's a character actor who kind of reminds me of James Gunn's brother, Sean Gunn. You'd know him if you saw him.
Wait, I can show you pictures. This is a visual medium you are currently engaging in.
Here he is as one of the titular people under the stairs in 1991:
And in quite a dissimilar role, as a police officer, eight years later, in Idle Hands:
So I thought it was worth checking his IMDB to see if he's in any other movies I would characterize as horror comedy -- and if, in fact, I might expect to see him again this month.
I clicked into a number of his 140 titles that sounded like horror movies -- he has a lot of them -- and got the following that also were characterized as comedies:
Road Kill (2005) - A short where he plays a man on a killing spree trying to complete one final murder for his masterpiece to be complete.
Hatchet III (2013) - I think this series is based on a killer carrying a hatchet?
Caesar and Otto's Paranormal Halloween (2015) - Brothers live out some of horror's most terrifying scenes when they housesit a house with levitating objects and signs of possession. Sounds like it pays homage to a lot of horror classics.
Clowntown (2015) - Although this 13-minute short does not actually have horror listed as one of its genres, consider this logline: "Two down-on-their-luck party clowns find their turf invaded by vampire cirque mimes who have marked them for death."
World of Death (2016) - Appears to be an omnibus film as there are three directors listed and it's two hours and 22 minutes long. The logline is only "Death has no borders."
None of these movies are on the list of 48 titles I shortlisted for this series, though one gets close: Hatchet is on my list, but Whalen doesn't appear in the series until Hatchet III. Could I skip straight to Hatchet III? Would I be confused about what was happening?
So while it's clear that others found him desirable to cast in horror adjacent projects like horror comedy -- especially shorts, where you could get him as a recognizable face for relatively little money -- he was more typecast in straight horror than horror comedy. (3 from Hell and Halloween II are among those sorts of credits, along with a lot you haven't heard of, so he was obviously a favorite of Rob Zombie.)
Two other comments about his filmography, though:
He's in Men in Black as "Passport Officer." Sci-fi comedy is kissing cousins with horror comedy, I reckon.
He's in my beloved The Cable Guy! Which certainly has its horror comedy moments.
So that'll probably be the end of Sean Whalen this month, but hey, this exercise has put a name to the face of a familiar character actor -- and who knows, if he googles himself, maybe he'll read this.
As for Idle Hands, well, it was a bit of a disappointment. Everything related to Devon Sawa's possessed hand was better when I saw it the first time, in Evil Dead II. Sawa does as much as he can with it and his performance is reasonably entertaining, as is the performance of his two buddies he kills early on, played by Seth Green and Elden Henson. But the script doesn't give us much, including no explanation for how Sawa got possessed in the first place, and way too little about Vivica A. Fox's character who has been searching out this spirit that possesses people's hands. They should have been giving us updates on her character throughout, yet we meet her once and then she's gone for like 40 minutes.
It's also one of those movies that reminds me how good I thought movies looked in the 1990s when I was watching them, and how bad they actually looked.
One thing that looked good, though, was Jessica Alba when she was only 18. I am reminded this is the first time I became aware of her, even though I only saw the trailers at the time.
Sorry, that almost got pervy there for a moment. I must have been possessed.
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