Rent Tucker and Dale vs Evil on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Eli Craig & Morgan Jurgenson
Directed by: Eli Craig
Starring: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
Affable hillbillies Tucker and Dale are on vacation at their dilapidated mountain cabin when they are mistaken for murderers by a group of preppy college students.
Verdict
This is a wacky adventure that revels in all of the familiar horror movie tropes, turning them on their head. That's what makes this so fun. College kids see two hillbillies that want to kill them. The hillbillies see a bunch of college kids with a death wish that won't leave them alone. What ensures is a ridiculous fight for survival, for both groups. It certainly helps to be familiar with b-level horror movies, but this takes the inherent silliness of horror movie conventions and crafts it into a grand joke.
Watch It.
Review
The concept is great. What if all of these horror movies where teens go
into the woods and get killed is a big misunderstanding?
The tone is over the top from the jump with annoying college kids only interested in partying. They're headed to go camping for the weekend. They encounter Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), who are planning to fix up their cabin, en route at a gas station. Dale wants to talk to the girls with Tucker giving him the advice of smiling and laughing. Dale ends up looking deranged, frightening the girls.
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| Alan Tudyk, Tyler Labine play Tucker, Dale |
Tucker and Dale's fixer upper vacation home in the woods looks like the home of a serial killer, replete with artifacts and evidence. They have more naive explanations for the contents of the home.
Of course the college kids are camping nearby. When Allison (Katrina Bowden) falls into the water, hitting her head, Tucker and Dale save her. The college kids assume the worst; that hillbillies kidnapped their friend. They sneak through the woods to rescue her. Upon approaching the cabin, they encounter Dale who had been cutting wood with a chain saw get into bees. He's now running around with a chainsaw reacting to the bees which looks menacing.
In horror movies we only see one side. This movie's silly yet entertaining concept is that everything may be a misunderstanding. The college kids think Tucker and Dale killed their friend. It doesn't help that the duo left a message, "We have ur friend." It's not received as intended. Aside from the miscommunication, a lot of the deaths revolve around the college kids tripping in the woods and fatally injuring themselves.
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| Jesse Moss, Katrina Bowden, Tyler Labine play Chad, Allison, Dale |
From the college kids' point of view, it does appear that Tucker and Dale are killing them off sequentially. Tucker and Dale see a bunch of college kids that appear to have made a suicide pact. The sheriff shows up, and he's inclined to believe the college kids. He searches the cabin and that begins a sequence with even more deaths as Tucker and Dale are hapless observers. The movie is a lot of what can go wrong will.
Allison asks Tucker and Chad to talk about what's happened instead of fighting, communicating to reach an understanding. While that provides important details, another rescue by the college kids leads to more deaths. This culminates in Dale trying to save Allison while fighting off deranged college kid Chad, who just happens to be "half hillbilly."
It's a movie that knows the genre well, using that to mock typical plot lines and narrative crutches. The result is an unlikely horror comedy.
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