Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

My 12-yr-old has been badgering me to let him watch some classic slasher movies just so he can see what they’re all about.  I’m thinking of caving, if for no other reason than to prepare him for Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.

Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) are a couple of well-meaning best friends.  They’re also hillbillies.  They dress like hillbillies, they talk like hillbillies, and they’re thrilled to be spending their vacation at their newly-purchased vacation home, a creepy cabin on a lake in the woods decorated with old news clippings of ancient horrors, wind chimes made of bone, and deadly booby traps.  Something tells me they bought the place sight unseen.

The College Kids are your stock group of College Kids off for a weekend of camping, drinking, dope, and sex.  Had they been Norwegian college kids, they’d have wound up contending with Nazi zombies in the snow.  As it is, all they have are Tucker and Dale.  When they see the two pulling one of their own into their canoe and paddling off, they assume their friend’s been abducted by evil hillbilly psychos and the fight’s on.  Tucker and Dale, of course, had simply been out fishing, saved the girl from drowning, and were taking her back to their new cabin to nurse her back to health.

And so begins a surprisingly funny, surprisingly gory horror-comedy in the vein of Evil Dead 2 and Slither.  The College Kids think they’re fighting for their lives and go about creatively killing themselves through oddball accidents, the hillbillies think they’ve stumbled upon some weird murder-suicide cult, and the recovering girl just wants to help sort things out.  By the time Actual Evil rears its ugly head and literally binds the girl in a sawmill, we’ve laughed and cringed and grooved along so happily that we’re actually sorry the climax is upon us.  The underappreciated Tudyk is just great, Labine hits all the right notes, and damsel in distress Katrina Bowden is lovely as the sweet College Kid with a surprising background.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is charming and gory and funny and altogether successful.  My 12-yr-old may not yet be ready for this kind of film; when he is, I look forward to sharing it with him.