So I finally got around to watching Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil after hearing nothing but good thought about it. I must say it did not disappoint, and is worth all the praise.
I think that the horror comedy genre is full of great movies. It takes the fun and structured formula of a horror movie, complete with the blood, guts and death that horror fans love and combines it with a more lighthearted or even darker humour to raise a lot of laughs. The genre is nothing new, but in the last near decade it seems to have grown, with movies choosing to take the formula from a horror sub-genre and turning it into a comedy. Shaun of the Dead was one of the first, with other less known such as Doghouse, Zombieland, Lesbian Vampire Killers, and Poultrygeist are all good examples.
Tucker and Dale, uses the standard formula of the Slasher genre and subverts it with clever and fun humour. It takes a group of college students, puts them in the middle of the woods and unleashes a group of blood-thirsty inbred hillbillies armed with chainsaws and beer to slaughter them one by one, in the obvious order.
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| The guy you didn't know was even there until someone had to die. He's always the first. |
Wait, there's something wrong with that. It doesn't sound funny, it just sounds like an unoriginal slasher flick. Well then, rewrite the formula so that a pair of harmless friends go out to their new vacation house and are set upon by a group of college students, who think they are serial killers. Throw in a couple of mishaps to blow everything out of proportion and there you have it. Comedy gold.
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| When nervously approaching pretty ladies always hold you're scythe in as non-menacing way as possible. |
The movie features a good cast. With the group of college kids being the standard group of actors just in the movie to be killed off and not being particularly important. It is Tucker and Dale who do an outstanding job in this movie. Played by guys I recognized really only from canceled T.V. shows Tucker is played by Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and Dale by Tyler Labine (Invasion). Both of them however are excellent actors and comedians and compliment each other well. The trick is, that the movie shifts all the roles to the opposite of what they would be if this was a standard horror movie. That is why the sexy eye-candy blonde, played by Katrina Bowden, is in fact a smart, sensible and decent human being and not some helpless victim, as close as she may get.
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| I doubt Dale would have ever fit that shirt, let alone those jeans. As for no sense of style... |
When it comes to the three main ingredients to a horror movie, Tucker and Dale have most of them. The location is pretty standard, college kids camping in the woods, an abandoned shack and apparently a lumber mill, but as Tucker and Dale's dream vacation house it doesn't feel like a scary atmosphere. As for the second ingredient, the blood and gore, we get it all, impalement, wood-chippers and nailguns, but none of it is too over the top. The movie is strangely lacking in the third ingredient however, sex and nudity as usually the first ones to be killed in a slasher movie are always the first pair to have sex, especially when the victims are college kids. I think that this was the right thing to do, as it keeps with the movies funny and innocent charm.
Overall Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a great movie and will definitely be memorable in the world of horror comedies. If you're a fan of either genre this will easily please you. The movie's opening sets itself up perfectly and hilariously and it's so much funner if you've seen enough slasher movies to know the formula.
Link:
Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil IMDB
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