“What it looks like what happened is pretty nasty.”
The unknown is scary. This is not a new, or even particularly trenchant, observation; it’s the bedrock of almost every horror film in recent memory. We have our families and our groups of friends, and we can pretty well predict how they’ll react to a given situation – this is why strangers are scary, and why they’re used as devices to scare us in horror. What Tucker and Dale vs. Evil presupposes is, what if they’re just as scared of us as we are of them? What if aggressor and victim, predator and prey, have far more in common than they think, and in fact consider themselves to be playing a role different from the one they’ve been assigned by social norms and stereotypes? What I’m trying to say is, Tucker and Dale, while uneven at times and sluggish at others, is a fun, dumb movie, one that’s not only smarter than it looks but smarter than it wants you to think it is.
We open on the worst group of kids in the world; they’re noxious cartoons, and Tucker and Dale knows this, as opposed to a film like Friday the 13th, which firmly believes these cool kids should be admired and emulated. The leader of the group is named Chad, for God’s sake (he’s played with perfect alpha-male obliviousness by The Uninvited‘s Jesse Moss). They howl things like “You’re either Omega Beta or you’re a freak!” before having a run-in with Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), the latter of whom is first seen in a hilariously jarring shot, staring coldly into the kids’ car. The kids run into Tucker and Dale again at a gas station, which makes for a funny set piece that really lets you get to know the two ostensible villains.
After buying supplies (which, ominously, include a hacksaw, hooks, and lubricated condoms), Tucker tells Dale to man up and go talk to Allie (30 Rock‘s Katrina Bowden, proving here that she’s a better actress than she’s often given a chance to be). Dale for some reason grabs a sickle and shambles over like an Appalachian grim reaper before lamely opening with “That’s a good-lookin’ cooler.” Tucker chastises him for his poor attempt at flirting, and Tudyk and Labine show off their considerable chemistry.
It’s no secret that Tudyk is one of those actors, often shunted off to supporting roles, who elevates every project he’s in (he stole the show in Rogue One). It’s Labine who is the revelation here; long since dismissed as an ersatz Jack Black type, he’s languished in sitcoms like Reaper and Sons of Tuscon playing the wacky best friend. But in Tucker and Dale he gets to show real heart, and he and Tudyk play off each other well.
The conceit of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is that these kids keep dying around the two, through no fault of their own. They’re assumed to be killer hillbillies, because the kids in this movie are a rarity in horror: people who have actually seen horror films, and know the story beats thereof. (In this way, Eli Craig’s film is more a descendant of Scream than a predecessor to Cabin in the Woods.) This is horror played as farce, or vice versa, and Craig directs accordingly. When Tucker and Dale are helping Allie recuperate after a blow to the head, it’s a light comedy of misunderstanding and mismatches, almost a comedy of errors (Dale enters with pancakes and Allie screams. His reaction: “Oh! It’s the pancakes! You hate pancakes!”). When Chad and the other kids come across a log on which Dale has carved WE GOT UR FRIEND, it’s shot with foreboding. This approach can result in some tonal whiplash from time to time, but it works more often than it doesn’t.
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil never crosses over into true horror, the way Cabin in the Woods does. As in any good farce, absurd characters and elements are continually introduced, heightening the insanity to a fever pitch. There’s a great extended gag wherein the kids try to storm Tucker’s cabin so they can rescue Allie. Tucker, having sawed his way into a beehive, comes running out from behind the cabin, waving his chainsaw around like Leatherface and hollering “Run for your lives!” This leads one of the kids, Mitchell, to be impaled while fleeing; later, a second kid, Todd, impales himself on a homemade spear while another guy jumps headlong into Tucker’s wood chipper. Naturally, Tucker and Dale assume the kids ventured out into the woods to fulfill a mass suicide pact. The two are often shown to be smarter than they look, particularly Dale, and their assumption makes sense because of their staunch refusal to believe they’re in a horror film.
And it’s almost to the film’s detriment that its two main characters are so charmingly buffoonish, because Tucker and Dale can drag when it cuts away from the pair. Moss does his level best with the role of Chad, but the character wants to be in a horror story even when the film doesn’t want him to. Of all the college kids, Chad is the only one who gets much of a backstory; he reveals that his parents were killed by hillbillies in the “Memorial Day Massacre,” and this layer of connectivity really undercuts the sense of everything being a random encounter.
The script – by Craig and Morgan Jurgenson – pulls a neat trick, even if it compromises itself somewhat. Throughout the course of the film, Chad metamorphoses into the villain; this is solidified after the cabin blows up, leaving Chad alive but insane, with a charred face (which, to be fair, is a cool touch). When this film works – and it often does, especially in its first hour – it’s because both groups think the other group is trying to kill them, and they react accordingly. As Dale says, “So many of the problems in the world are caused by lack of communication.”
By the climax of the film, the conceit is mostly abandoned, as Chad has Allie tied up and is preparing to feed her into a buzzsaw. Dale gets a nice hero moment (“If you want a killer hillbilly, I’ll show you a killer hillbilly”) but comedies die when they stop being funny, and Tucker and Dale unwisely tries to act as an actual horror film here. It’s not enough of a misstep to dismiss the film, but it does kinda suck that Craig couldn’t stick the landing. It seems as though Tucker and Dale vs. Evil loves horror films so much it couldn’t help but try to be one.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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