Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Director: Eli Craig
Year Released: 2010
Rating: 3.0

Intriguing horror satire has good-natured hicks Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) going to their dilapidated cabin in the woods in order to fish and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon (not Heineken!) before crossing paths with a group of college kids aiming to skinny dip and smoke weed - in a series of hilariously gory misunderstandings, the college kids end up dying (by accident!) and Tucker and Dale are mistaken for mass murderers. I personally love how Craig - who worked on the script with Morgan Jurgenson - takes a healthy knowledge of horror clichés and flips them around: normally the films in this genre follow around the "innocent" teens looking for a good time (and plagued by psychotic outside forces), while here everyone is basically trying to enjoy themselves and things get progressively out of control (as Katrina Bowden's character says, it's all about communication). Though the script manipulation gets a bit much with the third act - forcing the Jesse Moss character to turn into a total lunatic - this borrows from Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) in a quite clever way: even a bumbling doofus can win over the girl of his dreams and still get to go bowling. Larry the Cable Guy gives his thumbs up.