3 out of 5

Director: Eli Craig

While unfortunately never quite fulfilling the potential hilarity of its concept, Tucker & Dale manages to be a pretty refreshing – and very occasionally extremely funny – spin on the horror genre. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are our titular leads, two hillbillies who have put money down on a dream: a fix ‘er up cabin in the woods that looks like every ‘deserted’ cabin in a horror movie. They are heading out to said cabin the same day that a bunch of horror movie teen cliches (purposefully written as such and wonderfully overacted) are camping / drinking / skinny-dipping in the area. A run-in in town already casts the hillbillies as creepies in the teens’ eyes, and a good deed is misinterpreted as a kidnapping. The misunderstandings continue to pile up, leading to chuckly circumstances and dead bodies, flipping the creepy hicks routine and some reliable horror tropes. It’s super smart conceptually, and you can’t help but smile at the setup, but it never quite gets above the bar in laughs, nor is it stylistically inspired enough to barrel ahead like, say, Shaun of the Dead. Director Eli Craig also walks a difficult line which helps and hurts the movie – the hillbillies are proudly portrayed as hillbillies, encompassing all those stereotypes, but they’re rounded out to give them full-fledged identities and depth. And while the teens are mostly stupid teens, the majority of them balk at obviously ridiculous ideas, giving their characters a dash of depth as well. But the inability to push things into full-on ridiculous thus necessitates a blah sub-plot which develops into a ho-hum full plot, and those rounded characters then have to get mediocre epilogues… So it’s worth a watch for a couple of solid laughs and the satisfaction of seeing a good idea on screen, but oh, what it could have been….