FilmSlashTV: ‘Tucker and Dale’ have bloody good fun

Tucker and Dale react with horror when they learn they're in a horror movie. (Courtesy Reliance Big Pictures)

REVIEW BY BURL BURLINGAME / bburlingame@staradvertiser.com

You’re probably of the ill-informed opinion that Neandertals and various hominids were sub-types of human beings. Now we know, thanks to “Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil,” that the true human sub-types are hillbillies and college kids. We’ve known it all along, deep in our craven bones, because we keep seeing it repeated in popular culture.

Let’s see — college kids out for a drive into the hills on a lark, seedy truckstops that warn “Last Gas,” inbred yokels who snicker at the pansy college boys and ogle the college coeds, rednecks in John Deere caps and overalls who glare from passing pickup trucks — oh yeah, THIS is going to go well.

That everything goes horribly wrong for everyone involved is due entirely to stupidity and prejudice, which is pretty much the way the real world works too. Tucker and Dale are hillbillies, sure, but they’re also sweet, innocent and helpful, even when dragging body halves out of a bloody wood chipper. And who’d guess that the psycho killer is a college kid? Not the others in his class, that’s for sure.

If you guessed that the college kids would react to campfire horror stories by midnight skinny dipping, you’ve seen the ancestors of movies like this.

This is an independent comedy that takes absolute joy in upending every dumb horror movie cliche that has developed as such movies evolve downwards. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are pretty much the best comedy duo in some time, and the timing and gags are first-rate, and even funnier if you’re a fan of the genre. This is the sort of brilliant horror comedy that Sam Raimi used to churn out for pennies, although even Raimi never tried to have a sit-down intervention between protagonists who are covered in each other’s blood.

Beginning psychologists take note — hillbillies and college kids may kill each other, but the greatest assets in maintaining the peace, on both sides, are hot coeds.

“Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil” gets a nice run at the Honolulu Academy of Arts’ Doris Duke Theater, with 11 screenings scheduled between Oct. 22 and 28 — just in time for Halloween. Click here for more details.
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Burl Burlingame is a features reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Email him at bburlingame@staradvertiser.com and follow him on Twitter.