Tucker and Dale vs Evil

This is one of those rare examples of a funny horror film that actually is funny. Never got a release here in UK which it should have had and so after really good reviews in the DVD mags here, i rented it.What really made it entertaining for me , a lover of films where teens going to meet their end by nasty guys who live in the woods , is that this film turns the whole idea on it's head by having the backwoods guys being caring and really good, and the teens getting the wrong end of the stick by causing all the deaths due to accidents. The two lead performers bounce off each other beautifully with a cracking good script which for a comic send up is so important.The film looks ace and special effects are above standard. This will become a cult film and for all my 60 years of loving slice and dice movies, i can really say this is really worth your time,watch with some beers and enjoy.

I saw the trailer to this film online and it seemed like a funny - yet unsustainable premise. I went to see it with friends anyway and I can't remember laughing so hard at a film in years. This movie takes a promising premise and knocks it out of the park. The cast is superb in this send-up of the psycho in the woods genre and the writing and direction take what I feared was an unsustainable premise and they give it surprising energy and humor. This is not Scary Movie crap. This is inventive and fresh and it has a beautiful heart. Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk are the "Hillbillies" in this hilarious tale of prejudice and paranoia and they deliver performances that are grounded and authentic. Tucker and Dale never become plodding stereotypes of ignorant rednecks. They are portrayed with great wit and dignity and the actors never overreach or retreat into the safety and insecurity of broad camp. The cast trusts the writing and the director and it pays off. The script by Morgan Jurgenson and director Eli Craig is tight, smart and has a wonderful heart. These qualities are given life by an above average cast that includes the lovely Katrina Bowden from NBC's 30 Rock. An especially guilty pleasure is the character of Chad, brilliantly played by Jesse Moss who channels some alternate universe version of a sociopathic Tom Cruise as the lead frat-boy. Eli Craig really guided home a winner with this film. The movie sets a course at the beginning and you know where you're headed in the first five minutes-- but Craig's the captain of the ship and this journey is filled with surprises and wonderfully subtle moments that give the film a fun trajectory and a brisk pace. You breezily travel through a fantastic, hilarious and utterly sublime entertainment. Bravo!

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL takes on the typical "killer hillbillies" movie by turning the entire sub-genre inside out. Through accident, misunderstanding, and assumption, a comedy of errors becomes a bloodbath!

Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) look like a pair of rustic maniacs, at least to the group of college kids who have crossed their path. Multiple deaths occur, sending everything into chaos. Will anyone live long enough to figure out what's really going on?

Hilarious, and at times, poignant, this could be a movie for the whole family, if it weren't for the outrageous gore...

What if you showed a backwoods-horror movie where city slickers take a wrong turn from the hillbillies point of view? What if they turned out to be basically decent folks who just wanted to go fishing at their vacation home? And, finally, what if it was the hillbillies who had to fend off against a murderous psychopath and got to take the pretty girl home?

But of course make it so that our surrogate watchers, a bunch of college kids out in the woods, should presume to know that hillbillies are a bunch of violent inbreds because they're familiar with the same movie lore we are, say Deliverance onwards. Make it so that a man with a chainsaw whizzing above his head recasts the most epochal scene from Texas Chainsaw as accident. Our enjoyment is that we're always placed a little closer, watching for a little longer, to know that there is no horror movie outside what is being imagined.

So there you have it; a Two-Thousand Maniacs with misunderstood maniacs. It's a clever idea, and new as far as I know in this field.

Now if horror is generally looked down upon, even in cases of solid craftsmanship, I wager it's for how it posits a battle with evil in absolute terms. We know that life is more a complex struggle than Hammer served us. Every horror film that matters has innovated by placing us one step closer to where real horror is assembled. Vampyr posited that it happened because we wanted to. Psycho moved the monster from the swamps to next door, and that was important enough at the time. Night of the Living Dead posited an entire world of insensate havoc but with no malice in the instinctive drive. The Tenant and later Videdrome transferred every visible distortion back in the retina of the mind's eye. In Possession, horror was the visual representation turned inside out from tortured soul.

This is just as good in this way. There is no evil outside a series of unfortunate events, we come to understand. There is only circumstance and our built-in notions of what any set of circumstances ought to mean. With film having saturated so deeply the world we know, in a lot of these cases what we claim to know we know from movies.

Our loss is that the idea must have seemed so striking and novel to whoever was approached to fund, that the project was rushed ahead before there was a chance to iron it out. So the first joke, a great joke, is played over and over again and wears itself thin. The finale resolves with just sparks flying from a chainsaw fight.

The extra layer that was probably tucked in at the last moment, is that the massacre backstory that we understood was just a campfire tale improvised on the spot, and was generic like a Wrong Turn sequel, is supposed to be culled from real life. So there was truth behind the legend, mangled many times over in the telling, that powers the chain of events to replicate it.

It makes sense then that one part of the movie, where evil is imagined, always plays out like a movie. Every time he appears on screen, he swirls everything into the narrative he was taught to have sprung from. It's pretty nifty.

What a wonderful, light hearted, enjoyable movie, with a great cast and a great story, you'll find yourself in stitches at the scenarios in this movie. How some the characters end up dying is just priceless, and our Tucker and Dale justifying what is going on as logically as they can. I just loved tucker and dale, the actors are just amazing, and seeing Alan in any project is always a welcome delight. A strong recommendation if your looking for a good flick to check out, get some good popcorn in, sit back and enjoy!