Crew
Directors – Lindsey Haun & Nick Roth, Screenplay – Nick Roth, Producers – Toby Bryan, Jacob Demonte-Finn, Clare Grant, Lindsey Haun, Christina Laskay, Azure Parsons, Nick Roth, Anthony Rutowicz & Ashley Holliday Tavares, Photography – Morgan Demeter, Kevin Schlanser & Chris Wedding, Music – Jimmy Haun, Special Effects Supervisor/Puppets – Toby Bryan, Production Design – Lindsey Haun. Production Company – Happy Canyon Club/A Group of Ferrets.
Cast
Jacob Demonte-Finn (Sam), Ashley Holliday Tavares (Diane), Christina Laskay (Carla), Lindsey Haun (Rebecca), Anthony Rutowicz (Cliff), Clare Grant (Kelly), Nick Roth (Dr Crane), Toby Bryan (Norm/Voice of Woody), Azure Parsons (Lilith), Seth Green (Voice of Harry)
Plot
Sam arrives at a get-together at a mountainside cabin in Utah organised by his friend Carla. He brings with him Woody, his talking handkerchief companion who gets aroused about wiping up messes. Other arrive, including Diane, Carla and her husband Cliff, Doctor Crane, and Rebecca and her brother Norm who may be members of a cult that are muttering about a sacrifice. Sam decides to put Woody away for the sake of being more social. What he does not realise is that Carla thought she was inviting a different Sam and in fact regarded him as too weird. As the group settle into the cabin, people start being killed.
In watching Hanky Panky, it feels you are sitting down to watch a glorified amateur film – the sort that fledgling filmmakers and students make as a wacky experiment. There are a bunch of similar such indie films round – Deep Dark (2015) where a man develops a relationship with a hole in the wall, Dave Made a Maze (2017) where a man builds a cardboard maze, Dead Dicks (2019) about a hole in one wall that produces copies of people – although Hanky Panky feels quite a few rungs down the ladder in terms of amateurism from these others.
The film’s most high-profile name is co-director Lindsey Haun who also plays the role of the sister cultist. Haun emerged as a child actor in the 1990s, most notedly with the remake of Village of the Damned (1995). She has appeared sporadically on screens as an adult actress in parts ranging from tv’s True Blood (2008-14) to a handful of genre roles in films like Shrooms (2007) and House of Last Things (2013). She has also directed several short films, all of which appear to fall into horror territory. She had previously solo directed the basics of this with the short film Hanky Panky (2014), an entry in the Los Angeles 48 Hour Film Festival. Co-director Nick Roth has written all of Haun’s other short films and has some credits as an actor.
All the characters in Hanky Panky are oddly dysfunctional. There’s the main character of Jacob Demonte-Finn’s Sam, who has social anxiety issues and has conversations with his handkerchief (which talks back to him). There are a bunch of others including New Age types, a pseudo-academic, a crass wife and her obnoxious husband, the weird neighbour (Clare Grant), and Lindsey Haun and Toby Bryan as a brother and sister who belong to some cult and talk about conducting a sacrifice. People start to be killed off. Later in the show, there is a malevolent hat that turns up.
Hanky Panky is the sort of film where you can clearly see the wires moving around the hanky and in particular the hat. Although this is also the sort of film where such appears to have been intended that way as opposed to just being really amateurish ie. that what we have is a film disguising its own amateurism by flaunting its bad effects. There is evidence of a hurried shooting schedule – shots where the camera is trying to track movement or being bumped. In other scenes you feel like the comedy being aimed for would have come off a whole lot better if the actors had had more rehearsal time and/or the opportunity to do more takes.
The proceedings get fairly silly. None more so than a scene where everybody stands around slapping everyone else in the face before someone announces “We’ve got to stop slapping people.” The silliest set piece is the scene with Lindsey Haun standing atop a coffee table putting on silly voices as she is possessed by the hat. The film does climax on a demented scene that involves a knock-down, drag-‘em-out fight between the hanky and the hat.
Hanky Panky is not related to nor should be confused with Hanky Panky (1982), the non-genre Gene Wilder comedy.
Trailer here