SXSW Film Review: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2009)
SXSW 2010
Directed by: Eli Craig
Starring: Alan Tudyk, Tyler Labine, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
Review by: Britt Hayes
Tucker and Dale are two redneck friends with a dream to own their very own vacation house in the woods by the lake. They sink their life savings into a “fixer upper” cabin and head up there for the weekend to fish, drink beer, and get to work on repairing their new investment. On their way, they bump into a group of college kids heading up to the same woods. Dale (Labine) is immediately taken by Allison (Bowden), but his surly appearance and inability to converse with the female sex give Allison and her friends the impression that Tucker and Dale are two scary redneck psycho killers.
What follows is a comedy of errors in the highest degree. When Allison almost drowns, Dale saves her and he and Tucker take her back to their cabin where they try to nurse her back to health. Allison’s friends, led by the douche-tastic Chad (Moss), approach the cabin and try to “rescue” her with some hilarious results.
This is the second film Eli Craig has written and directed after The Tao of Pong, which I have never heard of and know nothing about. If this were Craig’s first effort, it would be a phenomenal one. Comedy is a difficult genre to master. Too often we’re flooded with dumb comedies that capitalize on dick and fart jokes, or shitty films masquerading as spoof comedies that spend 90 minutes showing you pop culture references and saying “Hey! You know this! It’s Britney Spears shaving her head and going crazy!” If comedy is a difficult genre, horror comedy is doubly hard. Feast managed to pull it off but failed to impress me with subsequent films. Horror comedy walks a thin genre line, and if not played well, can completely lose an audience.
Tucker and Dale is a perfect horror comedy. There’s blood and gore for horror fans and plenty of laughs for those looking for a fun film on a Friday night. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine hand in fantastic performances as the titular leads. I already loved Tudyk before from Dodgeball, a guest spot on Arrested Development, and Knocked Up. It seems criminal that he doesn’t have more of a career. I saw him in a DirecTV commercial not long ago. That is a fucking travesty. Labine is relatively new, but most people know him from the short-lived series Reaper on CW. I recognized him immediately as the drunk guy who walked into the coffee shop porn shoot in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. He also has a new show coming out on Fox called Sons of Tuscon, which I hear is very funny.
The supporting roles are just as great. Katrina Bowden – who is known best for playing Cerie on 30 Rock – proves that she has more than one dimension as Allison, the empathetic, not-so-typical pretty college girl. And Jesse Moss as shit-heel Chad is almost as equally hilarious as Tudyk and Labine. If you hate that frat-bro, possible date-rapist in khaki shorts douche bag, he totally nails it.
A great aspect of this film is Craig’s ambitious plot: what if those backwoods rednecks that are always the psycho killers in movies end up being well-meaning guys that are just really misunderstood, and all those deaths that they cause are nothing more than the result of comedic error? It’s a long shot, but it works. Craig mentioned after the screening that Tudyk and Labine did ad-lib some of their lines, and it’s a good thing they did. One of the funnier bits is Tucker constantly pouring Pabst Blue Ribbon on his wounds, which was Tudyk’s idea.
Tucker and Dale is a film that will have no issue finding distribution, and I see it getting a release in late September/sometime in October. It would be the perfect pre-Halloween film. It has familiar elements from the horror genre but will manage to attract a wide audience of genre fans and the young and old alike. People will be quoting this film for months, no doubt in my mind.
Trailer:
