The Slasher Movie Where the Killers Are Just Trying to Fix Their Cabin
Nerdy Up North
The setup
Tucker and Dale head to their new woodland cabin for a quiet holiday. A group of college students mistake them for murderous hillbillies, and a series of increasingly bloody accidents convinces both sides that the other is trying to kill them.
I love how Tucker & Dale vs. Evil flips the entire horror trope of evil hillbillies and makes Tucker and Dale just two genuinely nice, wholesome guys who want to spruce up their new cabin in the woods.
That is basically the whole joke, but somehow the film keeps finding new ways to make it work.
A group of camping college kids see Tucker and Dale and immediately assume they are exactly the kind of murderous backwoods lunatics they have seen in a hundred horror movies before. From that point on, every single misunderstanding makes things worse until the teenagers convince themselves that it is a kill or be killed situation.
What follows is scene after scene of laugh-out-loud, sides-hurting humour.
The best part is that Tucker and Dale are completely oblivious to what is happening. From their point of view, these random college kids just keep turning up and accidentally killing themselves in increasingly horrific ways.
Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are perfect together. Their friendship feels genuine, and Dale in particular is such a likeable character that you immediately root for him. He is shy, awkward and convinced that nobody could ever be interested in him, while Tucker constantly tries to build his confidence.
That wholesomeness makes the violence even funnier.
And it is still a gruesome movie. People are impaled, shredded and generally destroyed in ways that would fit perfectly into a straight horror film. The horror elements are absolutely still there, but this is a comedy through and through.
The film works because it understands the genre it is making fun of. It knows all of the clichés, but rather than just pointing at them and saying “look how stupid horror movies are”, it completely reverses them.
The scary hillbillies are actually the nicest people in the movie, while the supposedly innocent teenagers become increasingly dangerous because they are so convinced they know what is happening.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is ridiculous, gruesome and genuinely hilarious.
There are plenty of horror comedies out there, but very few commit to one simple joke this well and somehow
Positives
Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are perfect together, the central misunderstanding is genuinely clever, great practical gore and several brilliant reversals of slasher clichés.
Negatives
The final act becomes more conventional and loses some of the clever misunderstanding that makes the first half so funny.
Verdict
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is stupid in a very smart way. It takes a familiar horror setup, changes whose perspective we are watching and gets an entire film out of the consequences.
