Saturday, October 2, 2010

Halloween Challenge - #2 Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Now - THIS one I loved unreservedly. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a pretty straight forward horror comedy. It takes the "college kids pursued by murderous hillbilly" tropes and inverts them and it is very funny. Basically, Tucker and Dale are two rednecks who have just bought their vacation cabin in the woods (which one of my seat mates thought looked a lot like the Evil Dead cabin - but don't all spooky woods cabins?). A group of college kids go camping near them, mistakenly believe that Tucker and Dale are trying to kill them and, in trying to fight back, manage to start killing themselves all over the property. In many hilarious ways.

I didn't recognize Tyler Labine, who plays Dale, but Alan Tudyk plays Tucker and they are both really good. The blonde college girl looked wildly familiar to me at first, and for about 10 minutes I kept going, 'wait. Christine Taylor isn't old enough to have a daughter that age!' and having random Hey, Dude flashbacks. But it turns out she was Suri from 30 Rock.

The whole thing is slappy and silly and doesn't drag on for too long with anything resembling an actual plot. I'm not going to link the trailer here, because while it had been months between my seeing the trailer and the film, one of my friends had just seen the trailer and thought it gave away some of the better punchlines. If you get a chance to catch this (other horror festivals? DVD?), I'd say check it out.

That brings me to my last point - I saw Tucker and Dale as a part of TerrorThon'10: 9 Days of Horror at the Somerville. I unfortunately only found out about it midway through the fest, so I couldn't make it to more than one night, even though I would have liked to. Anyways, it seemed like a really cool fest, and if you're in Boston, getting on their mailing list would be a good idea.

4/5 Stars

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