Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a comedy based on tropes of the horror genre about 2 rednecks, Tucker (Tudyk; Serenity) and Dale (Labine; A Good Old Fashioned Orgy), who are headed to their “fixer-upper” of a cabin in the woods that they’ve just purchased.  Through a series of miscommunications and snap judgements a group of college kids in the same woods mistake them for backwoods killers.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a movie that has never gotten it’s due.  It is truly a wonderful comedy that’s filled with gore and executed brilliantly.  I feel like it could have been huge had it received a wide theatrical release in the US and an advertising push.  Instead it got relegated straight to video for people to discover on their own time.  But what happened, happened so let’s get talking about the movie.

The first great thing that Tucker and Dale does is to know it’s genre.  It is decidedly a comedy.  A comedy about horror movies that is filled with blood and gore, but it isn’t really a horror movie.  This might seem like semantics, but it’s actually very important and it’s a mistake that I feel a lot of movies that are straddling genres make too easily.  Inside this comedy there’s also a message.  A quite important message of the mistake of judging a book by its cover and not to take things at face value.

The mistakes begin when while fishing at night Tucker & Dale run into a group of college kids in the woods.  One of these kids dives into the water (Bowden; 30 Rock) and is knocked unconscious and the well meaning Tucker & Dale pick her out of the water and try to help.  The college kids just seeing the men mistake them as doing something horrible and run away.  This forces Tucker & Dale to take her back to their cabin to take care of her and make sure she’s alright.  From there on there’s constant miscommunications between the groups and lots of hilarious accidents.

Besides being incredibly well written and directed, the thing that makes Tucker and Dale vs Evil work so well is the array of great performances.  They enlisted some world class actors who really understood what they were doing and that shows.  The titular characters played by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are pitch perfect.  Then there’s Katrina Bowden who’s also just incredible.  I also have to mention Chelan Simmons who plays a stereotypical blonde college girl with perfection.

You’ll probably think that this is a lot like The Cabin in the Woods, but although they both play with some of the same genre conventions, they are in fact very different movies.  Although I think if you like one, you’ll like the other.

Overall Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a great, unique gem that you should immediately check out.  It’s available all over the place, but help us out and use these links:

Also available for download via Amazon Instant Video