BEFORE: TV's been pretty dead this week, what with some big basketball tournament going on that I couldn't care less about. Sorry, my bracket is filled with movies, and they aren't going to watch themselves. But I've had time to start catching up on "True Detective", the third season (following the second season that sucked big time, and the first season that was amazing). It's only 8 episodes, so I can knock off one just about every night, instead of binging straight through, and still get it all done in just over a week. The third season at least seems like a return to form, more like Season 1 than Season 2, but there's that old bugaboo again - do you just do what worked before again, or take a chance and do something new, which could also alienate the fans from before? (See also: "Super Troopers 2")
But "True Detective" is probably the opposite of tonight's film, even though both might involve people being killed out in the woods. One's a serious HBO drama, and the other looks more like a comedy (?). To give you an idea about how long this film's been on my watchlist, I spotted it on Netflix when I first started taking Netflix seriously - that was probably around July 4 in 2017. But it was so hard to link to, or so low-priority for me, that it eventually scrolled OFF of Netflix (I think the average term there is 2 years) in Dec. 2018, but thanks to my new linking system, I finally found a way to link to it, by putting it between two other films with Tyler Labine, who carries over from "Super Troopers 2".
So, OF COURSE by the time I found a way to link to it, it was gone from Netflix. So I resigned myself to renting it from iTunes for $3.99 when it finally rose to the top of the list. But then at the start of March I read one of those posts on-line about "everything coming to Netflix in March", and I couldn't believe my luck, this film was coming BACK to Netflix, almost exactly on the day I needed to watch it. OK, maybe I tweaked the schedule a little bit then, but it lines up perfectly now, so I can watch this film for free (OK, maybe not FREE, but at no additional cost) before it disappears again.
THE PLOT: Affable hillbillies Tucker and Dale are on vacation at their dilapidated mountain cabin with they are mistaken for murderers by a group of preppy college students.
AFTER: Thank God, this was a total spoof of slasher films, not a slasher film itself, not really. Not one that could be taken seriously, anyway. It's all based on comic misunderstanding, because a bunch of entitled college students going camping have probably seen too many horror films, they mistake a couple of innocent locals who just want to fix up their new vacation cabin for murderers - after all, they have chainsaws (to clear brush) and a wood-chipper (to chop it up) and they're big, dumb and talk funny. Plus, admit it, they might look a little creepy, but only an elitist upper-class person would automatically assume that people who live in the woods are automatically serial killers and chain-saw massacrers.
That's really the only thing the film gets wrong, because the college kids today are so P.C. that you'd think that they'd be hyper-aware of class-based stereotypes and take great care to not use them. But since this is a comedy, you kind of have to allow them to be dumb, because that creates the comic misunderstandings. And when Tucker & Dale save a pretty girl from drowning, and take her back to their cabin to recover, her friends naturally assume (having seen "Friday the 13th", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and of course probably "Deliverance") that they've taken her to be a prisoner, sex slave or worse.
The preppy kids plan an attack on the cabin, but it does not go well. They end up being very bad with weapons, or just generally clumsy, and several of them meet bad ends just by improperly handling guns or spears, or missing their targets, or just tripping and dying. The sequence sort of reminds me of the X-Force attack in "Deadpool 2", only this film did it first. Things spiral out of control like a cartoon version of Murphy's Law where everything that can go wrong does, provided that it also happens at a time that is also funny or ironic.
Meanwhile, from the hillbillies' perspective, it appears to them that a bunch of kids ran on to their property just to commit suicide. What other explanation could there be? But just try telling that to the sheriff when you're holding half of a college student and several more bodies are lying around. Though the number of comic mishaps starts to stretch the bounds of believability, eventually it starts to seem like maybe there's just something in the air or the water that's causing all the chaos. Eventually we learn why one of the teens has a particular hatred for hillbillies, and the whole story sort of gets flipped on its ear with regards to who's really represented by the evil mentioned in the title.
So it's clever, I've never seen another film like this, I don't think there could BE another film like this, unless you go back to some low-budget slasher film like "Student Bodies", and this is still probably better than that was. And the two leads are likable enough to carry the film, despite the fact that they can only toggle between dumb, naive and weary over why college students want to kill them.
Also carrying over from "Super Troopers 2" is an unusual location, both films have scenes set in an old sawmill, and both films have a character tied to a board heading toward one of those big old-time rotating saw-blades, which really is a trope that goes back to the days of early silent film serials.
Also starring Alan Tudyk (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss (last seen in "The Big Year"), Chelan Simmons, Philip Granger, Brandon Jay McLaren, Christie Laing, Travis Nelson, Alex Arsenault, Adam Beauchesne, Joseph Allan Sutherland, Karen Reigh, Tye Evans.
RATING: 6 out of 10 bee stings
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