Tucker & Dale vs.
Evil has little evil at first; or rather, it sets up a
situation with no good reason to expect it. Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and
Tyler Labine) are two kindly small-town folk who eagerly drive deep into the
woods for a much-needed vacation at a crumbling cabin that was sold cheap since
its old inhabitant was allegedly some kind of crazed criminal. While out
fishing one night, they’re startled by the sight of a pretty young woman
(Katrina Bowden) preparing to swim. She’s just as startled as they are, so she
ends up falling and hitting her head. Tucker and Dale rescue her and take her
back to the cabin to nurse her back to health.
What these two nice guys don’t realize is that her friends
are under the mostly false impression that she disappeared into the woods and
was kidnapped by killer hillbillies or psychotic rednecks. The group of college
kids she left behind plots to rescue her, but in the process creates only more
and more misunderstandings. A particularly snotty frat boy classist (Jesse
Moss) takes the lead and convinces one kid to sneak up to the cabin. As he
does, Tucker is preparing to operate a chainsaw but instead gets attacked by a
swarm of bees. So, around comes Tucker running with a chainsaw and flailing wildly,
spooking the kids and reinforcing their preconceived notions. Oh, and the kid
who was sneaking up ends up running in such a blind panic that he impales
himself on a tree branch.
The college kids think they’re in a horror movie. After all,
they’re on vacation camping in the woods and are all of a sudden in danger from
the wilderness and from Those Who Are Not Like Them. It’s creepy to begin with,
but scary stories around the campfire suddenly have suddenly appeared to become
real. The audience, however, is in on the bloody joke. Tucker and Dale just
wanted to have a nice weekend and are suddenly confronted with crazy kids
running around, acting unexpectedly hostile, and getting killed in freak
accidents. Tucker and Dale are the sweet innocents being terrorized. The
college kids are the unwitting victimizers, the misunderstood monsters, hurting
mostly themselves while making things very strange for these two nice guys.
Tucker & Dale vs.
Evil is a 90-minute riff on its central genre flip. First time director Eli
Craig, who co-wrote with Morgan Jurgenson, keeps the energy high, reveling in
his neat little trick of a plot in a knowing way. Wacky bloodshed is the name
of the game, held up by an endless string of sudden surprises that show up out
of the inherent inevitability in its double-barreled structure of
miscommunications. Neither group can clearly understand what the other is up to
simply because they are viewing the world as filtered through horror films and
socioeconomic assumptions. The college kids are convinced that they’ve
encountered kin of Leatherface or Jason. Tucker and Dale think they’re being
terrorized by a suicide cult. They’re staring at each other across an
artificial social divide.
It’s not exactly a one-joke movie, but that’s not far off.
It has only one approach. It sets up innocent situations with potential for either
understanding or senseless violence and then twists them up through
increasingly unlikely mistakes into the worst-case scenarios until it ends with
inadvertent carnage. The concept is funny and startling, but it wears out its
welcome ever so slightly. It grows repetitive and more than a little
predictable. But because Tudyk and Labine are so very charming and inherently
likable, I remained involved in the increasingly harried plight of Tucker and
Dale’s ill-fated vacation. Besides, it’s hard not to care when there’s some
pathos to be found in the way that Dale has internalized the way society sees
him, especially when he tells the girl they rescued that the whole situation
they’ve found themselves in is his fault. “I should have known if a guy like me
talked to a girl like you, somebody would end up dead,” he says. He and the
filmmakers are fighting for the little guy arguing, however crudely and
simply, that caricatures are people too.
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