Tucker & Dale vs. Evil – Review

In 2004, a group of little know actors came together to film one of the best horror-comedies of all time. SHAUN OF THE DEAD tuned the sub-genre on his ear. Before their film came out, the horror-comedy genre was one with many failures. It’s one of the harder sub-genres to pull off. Many jokes can fall flat and the movies end up being more silly than they should be. One of the other things that movie did so well, was they made a movie with heart for a genre (zombie) they loved. The movie wasn’t tongue-in-cheek, and it wasn’t making fun of the genre. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (co-writers) used ideas from the movies they loved and put them together to make a movie that was great as well as fun. Co-writers Morgan Jurgenson and Eli Craig have done the same thing to the back road-redneck-killer movies in TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL that Pegg and Wright did for zombies with SHAUN OF THE DEAD.

TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL is a love letter, or sorts, to movies like WRONG TURN, THE HILLS HAVE EYES and even DELIVERANCE. A group of college kids are traveling to the woods for their vacation. They stop off at a gas station and run into Tucker (Alan Tudyk; DODGEBALL, FIREFLY) and Dale (Tyler Labine; REAPER, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) who are 2 hillbillies traveling to their “fixer-uper” vacation home. While the co-eds are gathering supplies from the gas station, Dale falls in love with one of them, Allison (the very sexy Katrina Bowden; 30 ROCK and the upcoming PIRANHA 3DD and NURSE 3-D). Tucker talks Dale into going over to Alli (as her friends call her) talking to her. When Dale goes over, however, he scares the co-eds away since they think he is a back roads killer. Tucker and Dale then continue to their new house. When they get there, the house is made up like something out of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, but they love it. It’s their home and they are going to have a great time there.

Meanwhile, that night, Chad (Jesse Moss; FINAL DESTINATION 3) tells his friends a story that happened 20 years before to a group of students like them in woods like the ones they are in. We are shown a flashback, complete with cheesy 1990′s dance music, of rednecks killing the group. After the story, the gang decides to go skinny dipping. What the group doesn’t realize is that Tucker and Dale are fishing in the same water. Alli is at the top of some rocks, and Dale, while covering his eyes since it’s not right to look at a woman as she’s getting naked, calls Tuckers name. This distracts Alli, who falls and hits her head. As Dale is saving Alli from the water, the rest of the group sees him getting her in the boat and think he is kidnapping her. The students run, so Tucker and Dale have to take Alli back to their house. The next day, Alli comes to and Dale tells her what happened. Meanwhile, the friends start to look for Alli. They come across the vacation home, but they think that Tucker and Dale are keeping Alli to kill her.

While trying to save Alli, one by one the kids die, but not at the hands of the supposed killers, but by their own hands. Tucker is cutting a log with a chainsaw, the only problem is there is a beehive that he hits. The bees chase him, and instead of dropping the chainsaw he starts to run with it. One of the students think Tucker is chasing him, and starts to run. The kid is running so fast he doesn’t see a branch in front of him and gets impaled. Things like this shrink the group down one by one, until the final climax which has an interesting twist that can be seen coming.

At it’s core, TUCKER & DALE VS EVIL is about having prejudices towards others just based on what they look like, and what you’ve seen in horror movies. The film is very funny as the co-eds are killed off one by by in the most ridiculous ways possible. Every cliche of the back roads-redneck serial killer genre are here, from the kills all the way down to the music. The question is, are Tucker and Dale the ones to be feared, or are the co-eds? Jurgenson and Craig have put together a script that isn’t making fun of this sub-genre of horror, but takes the cliched parts and uses them to tell their story. This movie has, inexplicably, been sitting on the shelf for about 2 years while playing various festivals. Magnet Releasing finally picked up the movie for distribution, and will release the film to Video On Demand services, iTunes, Amazon, Playstation and other services like this on August 26. There will also surely be an HDMovies release of the film before that, and it’s worth checking out through one of these services.

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