Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

[3.5 stars] [IMDB Link]

[Amazon Link]
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According to IMDB, this little movie managed to gross $222,011 in the US earlier this year, safely in the "bomb" category. But the critics pronounced it decent, and the Netflix algorithm thought I would like it, and so to Pun Salad Manor it came. And, lo, it was very entertaining. Movie audiences don't know everything.

The setup is Standard Grisly Horror Plot 7b: A group of pretty college kids are off to the remote Appalachian back country for a camping trip. But—oh oh—they run into a couple of native hillbillies (Tucker and Dale) who seem to be menacing. But never mind, they're off to their campsite. Which just happens to be adjacent to a derelict shack in which our hillbillies reside.

But the thing is: Tucker and Dale are really pretty good guys. Uneducated and naïve, maybe. And Tucker is a little dim; Dale, on the other hand, is kind of smart. Nevertheless, some merry mixups serve to escalate the tensions between the kids and the hillbillies; it doesn't help that (a) the kids are the clumsiest screwups I've seen in a movie this year; (b) one of the kids is kind of a violence-prone psycho. Bodies start piling up.

It's all played for laughs, and it worked for me. The MPAA rated it R for "bloody horror violence, language and brief nudity", but the "bloody horror violence" has a strong slapstick component.

It's a real change of pace for the actor playing Tucker: Alan Tudyk is probably best known for his intrepid spaceship piloting in Firefly.


Last Modified 2024-01-28 2:21 PM EDT