Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil will be playing in selected cities for exclusive Midnight Showings.
Check the official website for details.
At first “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” will play all too familiar. A group of cocky and gorgeous college kids are headed to the woods for a nice clichéd Horror Film camping trip replete with beer, drugs and pre-marital sexy time. Out amongst the fog dribbling trees there awaits a ramshackle cabin, ominous and dark. What dwells inside? A legion of bedlamite demons awaiting to swallow your soul or a deranged crazy man with a pickaxe looking to add to his eye lid collection?
Nah, it’s just Tucker and Dale, a couple of good ol’ boys on holiday at their recently purchased vacation home that just so happens to look as if it harbors a family of flesh eaters (and who knows, it may have at one point). To these guys, it’s a fixer upper. And Tucker and Dale also just so happen to look like just about every other backwoods villain that usually appears in this sort of flick. Used to convention and quick-judging by appearances, the college kids are certain that they are doomed and once members of their little flock start showing up missing and/or dead, it seems that there fears are confirmed. The depraved rednecks are going to kill them all!!! Just like in the movies!!!
But, as the film’s perspective shifts to tell the story from the “bad guys” point of view, we come to find out that every death and disappearance are really just unfortunate mishaps that continuously paint Dale and Tucker as horrible miscreants. The disembowelments and mutilations that are sprinkled through “TDv.E” are a series of hilarious misunderstandings that fuel the film, making for an uproarious and original tale that will inevitably achieve cult cinema status.
Directed with a keen eye by Eli Craig, (for your notes: He’s Sally Fields’ son) the film is a sort of Horror Genre spin on “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”- a play by Tom Stoppard which took “Hamlet” and turned it into absurdist comedy by telling the familiar tale from the angle of a couple of peripheral characters that usually roam around in the background. While “TDv.E” never touches on the existential elements of that play (in fact this more accurately warps into a romantic comedy), it does offer us something exciting and fresh by flipping perspectives. The result is a parody in the vein of “Young Frankenstein” that riffs on the trappings of the genre while creating a stand alone film that is more like a better looking (and smarter) cousin to “Wrong Turn,” “The Hills have Eyes” or the weak remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” than a spoof of those films.Unlike the dim-bulb work of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (“Epic Movie,” “Vampires Suck”) and the endless supply of cheap imitation from the “Scary Movie” series, which merely re-presents familiar scenes from other movies recast with Carmen Electra, “TDv.E” doesn’t mock the Horror Genre but pays tribute to it.
Alan Tudyk (“Firefly,” “A Knights Tale”) is the most recognizable face on the screen and gives a nice and rounded character in Tucker who just wants to be able do some night fishing while sipping on a Pabst. The most lovable character on the screen is the cuddly Dale (Tyler Labine) and his budding romance with Allison (Katrina Bowden)- which takes up much of the film’s running time that doesn’t involve buckets of blood- could have been the element that separated “TDv.E” from spoof is slightly tainted by Bowden’s inability to utter a believable word on film.
The beautiful and untalented Bowden is not the only misstep. The plot’s connective tissue wears thin by the end of the film and the last few accidental deaths do not pack the punch felt in the film’s first hour. These are minor gripes that only keep the words “Cult Classic” out of this review. Go see this movie and go to a midnight show if you can find one. You will not be disappointed.