Tucker & Dale vs Evil

A group of typical college students are on their way through the isolated West Virginian wilderness when they come across a couple of Red Necks. Afraid, they scarper and set up camp near a lake. The Red Necks, Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) have recently bought an old cabin and are in the area to do some fishing and maintenance. That night the kids go skinny dipping and one of them (Katrina Bowden) falls in banging her head. Dale and Tucker come to her rescue and pull her aboard their boat. The other kids see this and believe she is being kidnapped and formulate a plan to get her back and enact their revenge.

The film is a nice twist and reverse of the classic kids in the woods surrounded by hillbillies film but is unfortunately usurped in its originality by The Cabin in the Woods. The idea itself is clever and interesting, it’s nice to have a look at the oftold story from the hillbilly perspective but after forty minutes I’d had enough. I laughed a couple of times in the opening minutes but overall found the film unfunny and boring. After the opening twist there is little else of interest and the plot becomes predictable and dull.

The characters of Tucker and Dale are quite sweet and misunderstood and I liked them but the majority of the kids had no character whatsoever. Allison had her charms and some depth but most of them were just filler. They were basically cardboard cut-outs until their death scene. The deaths themselves were hardly inventive, the majority ended up impaled on something accidently and it has all been done before. Much like The Cabin in the Woods the film knowingly uses and mocks clichés and this is one of the positives. Another positive is the love story, even though it is incredible improbable.

Overall this is an interesting riff on the teen slasher genre though it is perhaps a more interesting idea than an actual film. The jokes fall mostly flat and the story becomes tired fast but it’s something a bit different and looks alright.  

5/10