Medium: Movie
Runtime: 1hr, 29 Minutes
Genre: Horror-Comedy
Failing my efforts to find a decently gripping horror movie this week (and none too interested in reviewing the ones in my DVD queue), I decided: screw it. This week, I am not reviewing a horror movie. Don't fret, I intend to stay seasonal. Just because it's October doesn't mean I can't branch out a little though...
You know all those slasher flicks where a group of college kids show up to a remote cabin in the woods for booze, sex, and drugs, and get picked off one by one by some psycho hillbillies?
This is the other half of that story.
Our titular pair of hillbillies have just bought themselves a 'vacation home' up in the Appalachian mountains. They're looking forward to a nice, quiet Memorial Day weekend of beer, fishing, and... well, maintenance work, because 'fixer-upper' is a very generous term in regards to how run-down their new cabin is. They're happy with it, though; it's a mansion compared to where they live, and- hey, bonus! Whoever lived there before left all their stuff!
Things turn south, however, when the two go fishing that night. They meet back up with the college kids they bumped into at a gas station on the way, and one of the girls hits their head on a rock they were climbing to dive into the lake. Tucker and Dale paddle to the rescue and pull her out of the water before she can drown, but to the kids, it looks like they've kidnapped her. In the morning, the kids set out on a rescue mission, kicking off a series of increasingly bloody accidents and misunderstandings...
Tucker and Dale is farce done right. There's no overblown gross-out comedy, no pop-culture references that will be dated in 3 years time. Yeah, there's a lot of blood (mostly because it's a send-up of the slasher genre), but a lot of the humor revolves around the misunderstanding between the teens who are convinced that they've set foot into a back-woods Friday the 13th, and our hillbilly heroes who are just trying to mind their own business. A lot of time, the horrifying ominous things that Tucker and Dale do are completely without malice- like using a hatchet to carve a message into a log (they had nothing else on hand to let her friends know where she is), or running with a chainsaw (because one of them had accidentally sawed straight into a hidden wasp's nest). It's this kind of great inversion of roles that drives everything.
The movie is well constructed even beyond its core gimmick- if you pay close attention to the details, you'll find things that could be written off as 'thrown in' for the sake of humor or slasher genre conventions may actually turn out to be plot important, and the titular 'evil' comes from an unexpected place. It's a good ride, so if you have some time (and a stomach for some mild gore) then I recommend it.
TL;DR: An actually-funny parody of the slasher horror film where the 'psycho killers' are the good guys.
VIRTUES: Surprising villain, likeable protagonists, horror-comedy that doesn't suck.
SINS: Few likeable redshirts.
GRADE: B
Runtime: 1hr, 29 Minutes
Genre: Horror-Comedy
You know all those slasher flicks where a group of college kids show up to a remote cabin in the woods for booze, sex, and drugs, and get picked off one by one by some psycho hillbillies?
This is the other half of that story.
Our titular pair of hillbillies have just bought themselves a 'vacation home' up in the Appalachian mountains. They're looking forward to a nice, quiet Memorial Day weekend of beer, fishing, and... well, maintenance work, because 'fixer-upper' is a very generous term in regards to how run-down their new cabin is. They're happy with it, though; it's a mansion compared to where they live, and- hey, bonus! Whoever lived there before left all their stuff!
Things turn south, however, when the two go fishing that night. They meet back up with the college kids they bumped into at a gas station on the way, and one of the girls hits their head on a rock they were climbing to dive into the lake. Tucker and Dale paddle to the rescue and pull her out of the water before she can drown, but to the kids, it looks like they've kidnapped her. In the morning, the kids set out on a rescue mission, kicking off a series of increasingly bloody accidents and misunderstandings...
Tucker and Dale is farce done right. There's no overblown gross-out comedy, no pop-culture references that will be dated in 3 years time. Yeah, there's a lot of blood (mostly because it's a send-up of the slasher genre), but a lot of the humor revolves around the misunderstanding between the teens who are convinced that they've set foot into a back-woods Friday the 13th, and our hillbilly heroes who are just trying to mind their own business. A lot of time, the horrifying ominous things that Tucker and Dale do are completely without malice- like using a hatchet to carve a message into a log (they had nothing else on hand to let her friends know where she is), or running with a chainsaw (because one of them had accidentally sawed straight into a hidden wasp's nest). It's this kind of great inversion of roles that drives everything.
The movie is well constructed even beyond its core gimmick- if you pay close attention to the details, you'll find things that could be written off as 'thrown in' for the sake of humor or slasher genre conventions may actually turn out to be plot important, and the titular 'evil' comes from an unexpected place. It's a good ride, so if you have some time (and a stomach for some mild gore) then I recommend it.
TL;DR: An actually-funny parody of the slasher horror film where the 'psycho killers' are the good guys.
VIRTUES: Surprising villain, likeable protagonists, horror-comedy that doesn't suck.
SINS: Few likeable redshirts.
GRADE: B
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