A talking hanky, alien invasion – is this the most silly, joyful horror film of all time?

It’s how so many chilling tales begin. A group of friends trek into the remote snowy wilderness, gathering together in a cabin, cut off from civilisation. It seems like a great idea, but then, inevitably … they make a movie.

Such was the experience of the cast and crew of Hanky Panky, an ultra-low budget comedy-horror currently on Apple TV+. In the movie, the group must deal with murder and supernatural terror: on set all they had to deal with was a near-total lack of the usual resources available to a film crew – although if a touch of cabin fever did infect them, it might explain some aspects of the story. But more on that later.

Jacob DeMonte-Finn as Sam in a scene from Hanky Panky.

Nick Roth wrote the script of Hanky Panky and co-directed it with his wife Lindsey Haun. Both Roth and Haun also star in the film as two of the unlucky cabin inhabitants. As Roth tells it, the basic premise of the movie came from necessity.

“This was a movie that was very much born of, like, what resources can we muster towards making a feature film and then build everything around that as organically as possible?” he recalls. “We knew we had, like, a cabin, friends who could act, and we had this funky camera that we won in a contest.

“So we have what we need to make a movie, what movie should we make? And I was like, let’s do a feature version of our silliest short.”

That short, made in 2014, was also called Hanky Panky, and revolved around – there’s just no other way of putting this – a sentient talking handkerchief. So now the title makes sense – though in the Pankyverse (yep, that’s a thing – sequels are planned) “making sense” is a very relative concept.

Roth, Haun and friends put the talking hanky idea together with the available resources – namely, a cabin in the snow and a group of acting friends – and came up with the obvious idea: a murder mystery about people trapped in a cabin during a blizzard who, one-by-one, start falling victim to a mysterious killer. And one of them has a talking handkerchief who gets sexually aroused by wiping up messes. Oh, and also, there’s an evil hat from another planet, voiced by Seth Green, who the hanky has to fight to the death.

So that’s the plot, and it’s the kind of plot that can either turn into wild comedic brilliance or come out as the worst thing you ever saw. Thankfully, due to the script and direction by Roth and Haun, and a cast who without exception hurl themselves into the insanity with incredibly silly gusto, the former was the result.

Hanky Panky may have been made on the kind of budget that makes shoestrings look bloated and extravagant, but it’s a winning tribute to the sheer power of unrestrained and unhinged ideas to triumph over practical obstacles. And those obstacles were many. Members of the cast took turns holding the boom mic when off camera.

The movie had three cinematographers for its three-week shoot because Roth’s camera operator friends would only commit to working for free for a week each. The production borrowed more than it bought. “We spent a few thousand dollars on production,” says Roth. “Everybody sort of chipped in for the expenses – really, the only expenses were things like food, batteries.”

It may have been cheap and cheerful, but there’s no doubting the creators’ commitment: after the 2016 shoot, Roth and Haun, in between making a living in the fickle entertainment business, and caring for their two children, spent seven years in post-production before finally emerging to the world last year. “Labour of love” is an understatement. As ridiculous as this movie is, it’s one that the people involved truly believed in.

“The whole spirit of the thing was, look, we know this is silly,” says Roth. “It’s fundamentally dumb. But what if we just, like, bear with me, what if we committed 100 per cent to trying to make the best film we could with just these few things – a talking napkin, with this cabin, with our friends, with no money … what if we didn’t half-arse it any point? Let’s just see if we can pull it off. And my feeling from the very beginning was, we should be able to because it’ll be funny.”

And so it proved: Hanky Panky is a chaotic but inspired melange of distorted genre and surrealist flights, with some scenes that deserve to become all-time classic moments, including a hysterical mass-slapping sequence and a detail regarding one character’s unusual physical attribute that is one of the funniest reveals in cinematic history, even with – or especially because of – the cheap nature of the effect.

Harry the Hat claims another innocent victim in the bloodied snow.

In fact, the movie, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a film which, with its low budget and absurdist aesthetic, is something of a spiritual cousin to Hanky Panky), is brilliant at making use of its financial limitations to enhance the comedy, something demonstrated perfectly by the very visible wires during the deranged hanky-hat fight. It’s also a true group effort: all the members of the cast are also credited as producers, and were encouraged to improvise and contribute as much as possible to moulding their own characters.

The only part of Hanky Panky that even hints at Hollywood is the presence of Green, heard but not seen as Harry the Hat (named after Harry Anderson’s occasional character in Cheers – did we mention everyone in this movie is named after a character from Cheers? Logical, right?).

It’s a surprising casting coup, but just like the rest of the actors, Green is there because of his friendship with the team: in fact, his wife Clare Grant plays Kelly in the movie.

At first, Roth wasn’t going to dream of asking his famous friend to play a part. “I didn’t want Seth to think that that was part of why we were being friends. So I didn’t. And then Claire, a year later, was like, ‘Seth feels left out that he didn’t get to be in Hanky Panky.’ And I was like, OK, good thing we shot with a couple of puppets.”

It’s the true independent filmmaker’s ethos: making do with what you can and grabbing opportunities when they come up. In the process, Roth and friends managed to make probably the best talking hanky alien invasion snowbound cabin murder mystery ever. Not many people can say that.

Hanky Panky: The Movie is available to rent or buy on Apple TV.

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