Bad Time at the Vacation Home

As long time readers (hell, even short time readers) of the site will know, I love slasher films. I think there’s something fun about the genre. The visceral scares are great, sure, but there’s also something delightfully fun about all the tropes as well. The group of friends getting together while a killer is on the loose. The way they’re picked off one by one in outrageous yet predictable ways. How the killer always seems to be just around the corner no matter how far or how fast the final girl has run. These films, despite their big kills and bigger scares, are still really silly at their core, and I just truly enjoy that.

A certain set of that genre, of course, are the films that see these teens go out into the woods to have a part away from society. Inevitably some kind of killer or killers finds them, usually it’s inbred rednecks, and then the kids meet their slasher movie fates at the hands of these evil killers. You can find this happening often, from The Hills Have Eyes to Cabin in the Woods, and there is always the great cabin out in the woods film, The Evil Dead, if you’re willing to substitute Kandarian demons for killer rednecks.

But these films are always told from the perspective of the kids getting bumped off, one by one. There are plenty of other characters existing in their worlds, living their lives while the story is focused elsewhere. What if some of these other characters were the true focus of the film? That’s the question posed by Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, a film about two redneck characters just trying to enjoy a vacation out at their cabin in the woods, when they get mistaken for a couple of redneck killers by a bunch of college students. It’s a solid inversion of the slasher movie formula that finds a way to mine plenty of laughs, and gore, from its parodic take on the material.

Tucker McGee (Alan Tudyk) and Dale Dobson (Tyler Labine) are two West Virginia rednecks having a fun weekend out in the backwoods of the state. Tucker recently spent his life savings buying an old “vacation cabin” out in the woods, and he’s brought his buddy Dale along to help him clean up, and fix up, the place so it can be a nice retreat for them whenever they want to come out, do some hunting, do some fishing, and generally just sit around, drinking beer and enjoying some peace and quiet. It could be a nice place with a good life, if it all works out.

Sadly, things don’t quite work out as intended. The boys accidentally scare a bunch of college students on their own drive up to the backwoods: Katrina Bowden as Allison, Jesse Moss as Chad, Chelan Simmons as Chloe, Brandon Jay McLaren as Jason, Christie Laing as Naomi, Travis Nelson as Chuck, Alex Arsenault as Todd, Adam Beauchesne as Mitch, Joseph Allan Sutherland as Mike, Karen Reigh as Cheryl. Then end up scaring Allison again when she’s off swimming, causing her to hit her head on a rock and sink. They save her, take her back to the cabin, and help her heal. But her friends, including fairly creepy dude Chas who desperately wants Allison for himself, think they’ve kidnapped her and are going to eat her or something. So they arm themselves and head to the cabin to kill the rednecks and get her back. Things, surprisingly, go very poorly for the college kids as they make this grand attempt.

There are two big jokes in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. The first is that the. Two rednecks at the center of the story, Tucker and Dale, really aren’t bad guys. They’re fairly well educated, kind and decent fellows, and while they are, yes, rednecks, they aren’t the “bad” kind of redneck. They are backwoods, murdery rednecks like the college kids seem to think everyone out in the woods might be, and the film is able to get a lot of laughs out of contrasting expectations for the characters versus who they are and how they actually act.

The biggest joke, though, comes when the college kids storm towards the cabin and try to get Allison back. That’s why the real meat of the slasher happens… in the dumbest way possible. To summarize, the kids attack the rednecks multiple times, but in each attempt they only manage to kill themselves instead. One such attempt leads to a sees a kid run up behind Tucker while the redneck is working on throwing branches into a wood chipper, but Tucker moves out of the way at the last second and the kid ends up jumping right into the wood chipper. “Why did he do that?! Is this some kind of suicide pact?”

Over and over the kills play out that way, and you can tell that the production team had a lot of fun figuring out ways to set up kills where Tucker and/or Dale are onlookers but don’t, in any way, have an active hand in the resulting death. It’s a balancing act, really, managing to make the kills both gory and ridiculous while also keeping the main characters in the dark just enough that they struggle to understand just what is happening around them. It’s amusing, made better by those gory kills and a few solid line deliveries, all of which prevents the concept from ever becoming truly repetitive.

It does help that the leads are a lot of fun to watch. Naturally it’s hard to say anything bad about Alan Tudyk. He’s a character actor who easily settles into any role he’s given, from Wash on Firefly / Serenity to K2SO on Andor / Rogue One, Wat in A Knight’s Tale, King Candy in Wreck-It Ralph… Really, I can’t think of a single bad performance from the actor, and Tucker is another of his solid roles. He’s both a little stupid but very endearing, with just enough ego and bluster to make his side character work with our unexpected hero, Dale.

I haven’t seen as many things starring Tyler Labine. I know he’s done a few shows I haven’t watched, and he’s been a side character in a lot of films, many of which I haven’t seen. Can I remember who he was in Escape Room? Nope, not at all. But I remember his performance as Dale, the sweet and kindly redneck with a heart of gold. He has great natural chemistry with both Tudyk, selling their best friends roles, and co-lead actress Katrina Bowden, selling the fact that the two steadily fall in love. He has the heart and soulfulness her needed to make you believe Dale really is the hero of the story, even when it’s this story where he should be the villain.

With all that said, I do think there are some missed opportunities that could have been improved on. While the film keeps the focus on Tucker, Dale, and Allison, it sells the other college kids short. They’re as shallow and vapid as any other victims in slasher films, and while that might have been the point, playing on that trope, it’s hard to care if they live, die, or succeed at killing the rednecks when they’re little more than glorified extras. It would have been nice to get a little more development from them so the film could have developed tension as well as laughs.

And if I’m being honest, the humor of the film does start to wear out by the last act. The joke about all the college students killing themselves does get played out by the last few bodies, and while the film has a bit of a twist it throws at the end to keep things lively, it’s not really a very well developed twist. I could have worked a little better. Along with that, there’s jokes that seem obvious – like Allison helping Dale dig a hole – that don’t pay off at all – “hey, he’s making her dig her own grave,” isn’t ever uttered once – and it feels like the writers didn’t quite have it all together on this film all the time.

Which may honestly be the case. There was a sequel in the works for years for this film (at one time going under the title Tucker and Dale Go to Yale) but apparently the leads, Tudyk and Labine, weren’t ever happy with the script for it and eventually the sequel was dropped entirely. Considering that this film kind of peters out humor wise by the end of the film, maybe the sequel seemingly felt even more tired and one-note retreading the same jokes. I certainly could see how that would be the case as you can only mine so much material from a basic premise.

Still, enough of this film works that I found myself enjoying it all over again as I watched it for this review. It’s not perfect but it does have some great gags, backed up by winning performances from the two leads. It’s an imperfect but enjoyable viewing experience that’s fun (for any slasher fan) to revisit once in a while. Yes, it’s silly, but that’s the whole point, both for this film and the genre as a whole.