Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)
Directed by Eli Craig
Two hillbillies are suspected of being killers by a group of paranoid college kids camping near the duo's West Virginian cabin. As the body count climbs, so does the fear and confusion as the college kids try to seek revenge against the pair.
16 connections found
View:
16 films that influenced Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
What critics say influenced Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
The titular hillbillies — shy, sweet Dale (Tyler Labine) and his best friend Tucker (Alan Tudyk) — are director/co-writer Eli Craig's genre-redemption project, peaceful rednecks hoping for some R&R who save a girl (Katrina Bowden) from drowning, only to have her jerky, classist friends assume a "Deliverance"-meets-"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" scenario and haplessly lay siege on the befuddled pair.
If your idea of a hillbilly is inspired by Deliverance, then <em>Tucker & Dale vs. Evil might make you rethink your banjo-picking prejudice (though it definitely tips its trucker cap to the traumatic river trip).
From Deliverance to the new Straw Dogs, elitist Hollywood hasn't shown rednecks any respect.
In a chance encounter direct from the Deliverance cliché file, while gassing up at a service station they coincide with a carload of airhead college students who misinterpret Dale's awkward friendliness as sure signs of rustic menace.
Scared senseless by campfire legends – and possibly one too many viewings of Deliverance, which Craig sends up nicely – the kids are superficial brats, reacting to a perceived threat where none exists.
When a bunch of college kids head off into Appalachia for a camping trip, everyone they meet along the way looks like leftovers from " Deliverance " -- or any of the dime-a-dozen horror flicks featuring inbred, slack-jawed, dead-eyed rednecks poised to turn into chain-saw-wielding cannibal-rapists at the strum of a banjo.
"Tucker and Dale" doesn't have the sustained pacing and escalating laugh density of, say, "Shaun of the Dead," but it has four or five of the funniest gags/lines I've seen this year, and it's a long overdue rebuke to genre laziness and Hollywood snobbery.Produced by Albert Klychak, Rosanne Milliken, Deepak Nayar and Morgan Jurgenson, directed by Eli Craig, written by Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson, music by Mike Shields, distributed by Magnet Releasing.
It's not as clever as, say, "Shaun of the Dead," but it's good for some laughs.
"Tucker & Dale vs. Evil" is more a cross between 2004's " Shaun of the Dead " and 2007's " Hatchet " than the crummy, convoluted recent " Creature ," and that's a very good thing.
Thankfully, co-writer and director Eli Craig gets the formula absolutely right on Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, making it THE best horror comedy since Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead in 2004.
The press materials promised that it does for hillbillies what "Shaun of the Dead" did for zombies... well not quite.
It’s all incredibly violent, but “Tucker & Dale” plays it for black comedy, like a kind of chicken-fried “Zombieland,” or redneck “Shaun of the Dead.”
From Deliverance to the new Straw Dogs, elitist Hollywood hasn't shown rednecks any respect.
But with this bright comedy , Eli Craig and co have revived it by giving a devilish twist to films such as Deliverance, Straw Dogs and endless B-movie horror flicks that demonise rural rednecks who prey on unwary city visitors.
Movies based on fear of leaving the interstate date to Norman Bates and beyond, but the trend has accelerated in recent years with remakes of 20th century countrified slaughterfests - "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Straw Dogs" "Last House on the Left," and on and on and on and on and on.
As recently as the rotten remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, anyone below the Mason Dixon line has been portrayed as a predator, a bloodlusting lunatic who just can’t wait to unleash his or her own internal demons.
Two weeks ago, " Straw Dogs " tiptoed its way around the Southerner-as-a-brute stereotype, with varying degrees of success, depending on whom you ask.
Suffice it to say that "seeing how the other half lives" has been a horror movie convention almost as long as horror movies have existed; from Todd Browning to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, audiences have repeatedly been asked to rethink their expectations of oddballs and weirdos, in most cases "or else." (Hell, hillbillies basically wouldn't have an on-screen presence at all if city slickers didn't venture into their literal neck of the woods.)
This subversion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn tropes is reasonably clever and delivered with requisite tongue in cheek, and a late revelation about Chad's relationship to a decades-old massacre further pricks horror cinema's fondness for "return of the repressed" thematic concerns.
One of the best comedic horror films since Shaun of the Dead chewed up and spat out the zombie movie, Tucker & Dale targets the genre spawned by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: pics about frat dudes and nubile coeds terrorized, tortured, dismembered, sexually molested, cooked, and eaten (not always in that order) by inbred, cannibalistic hillbillies.
The moment the antagonists of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes hit the screen, they're identifiable on sight as an unknown "other" to be feared.
Years later, Craig makes his feature directorial debut with a horror spoof that turns the murderous hillbilly genre inside out while poking fun at movies like "The Blair Witch Project," "Cabin Fever," "Friday the 13th," "Blue Velvet," "Fargo" and the granddaddy of them all, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
In this goofy inversion of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, two innocent country boys (Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) must defend themselves from a group of overly vigilant "college kids" vacationing near their cabin.
Advertisement
Referencing everything from Deliverance to The Evil Dead to Fargo and nailing its central conceit dead-on (literally!), this is one of those rare genre comedies that near-perfectly balances its blend of grue, guffaws, and gag reflexes.
It's not exactly a house - more like an oversize shack, a creepy, rickety, ramshackle number straight out of Sam Raimi's 1981 spoof The Evil Dead.
"Tucker & Dale vs. Evil" manages this tough feat, and for that the feature writing-directing debut of actor Eli Craig (1999's " The Rage: Carrie 2 ") is worth noting.
But what I feel makes the flick so satisfyingly entertaining are the various riffs on slasher movie conventions, including send-ups of several iconic moments from movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wrong Turn, Friday the 13th and even Final Destination.
Since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and other hillbilly horrors of its kind started dicing up tourists back in the ’70s (or even since Psycho, if you squint and look sideways), the trope of the creepy small-town killer knocking off progressive urbanites has popped up in hundreds of horror movies.
Tucker & Dale vs Evil even features a tender love story between Allison and Dale (think Romeo and Juliet by way of the Coen Brothers).
Advertisement
Jesse Moss (Final Destination 3) is given a bit more to work with as Chad (the group’s resident hillbilly expert) but can be a bit excessive – even for a movie that plays heavily on caricatures.
Meanwhile, a group of six college kids are headed in the same direction, with loud mouthed Chad (Jesse Moss, "Final Destination 3," "The Uninvited") clearly the group leader.
The bearded, vacuous face that gapes at the campers from a passing pickup might be a rifle-totin' rube who fondly remembers the bloody climax of " Easy Rider ."