I have to be honest, hillbilly horror is not a subgenre I have a lot of interest in. The Hills Have Eyes (1977), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), these are titles I don’t really gravitate towards, in part because I don’t generally enjoy movies that make humans into monsters by making them creepy, uneducated, and lecherous (we have way more interesting ways of becoming monsters!). Enter tonight’s movie club selection, Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010), a movie that dares to ask: are those two hayseeds really deranged murderers, or is this all one big misunderstanding? This black comedy has us follow two well-meaning hillbillies who get mistaken for deranged murderers by a group of college kids. Did the duo win me over, or was it one big bloody mess? Read on to see what I thought of Tucker and Dale vs Evil!

The following contains spoilers for Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)
When a crew of college students comes to town for spring break, they see two leering hillbillies on the road. When they stop for gas, the dirt-covered duo seem to follow them, almost like they’re stalking them. While the two groups are separated, we learn the two guys’ names are Tucker and Dale, and they’ve just purchased their own fixer-upper vacation home. Dale asks Tucker for advice on how to talk to girls, and his shyness is misread as a threatening aura when he attempts to speak to one of the college girls, Allison, played by 30 Rock’s Katrina Bowden. That vacation home does appear to be the former site of a haunting or Resident Evil 7 situation, but the two are resolved to clean the place up, despite warnings from the county sheriff.

While Tucker and Dale fix up their cabin, Chad, identified as the leader of the spring breakers by his popped collar, tells his friends about the hillbilly maniac murders that happened in these same woods several years ago. He reveals his deep-seated hatred for hillbillies, as his father was killed in that tragedy, and his mother, the only survivor, went insane from the horrors she saw that night. To break the tension, someone suggests they all go skinny dipping in the lake, now that the sun has set. Unbeknownst to them, Tucker and Dale have gone night fishing, and accidentally find themselves at the scene. Flustered, Dale pleads to let them announce their presence so as not to create an embarrassing situation, while Tucker tries to bring the boat in closer, and scares Allison, standing somewhat separated from the group, into slipping on a rock and hitting her head.

Panicked, the two do what any good Samaritan would do, they rush to save Allison, alerting the nearby college students to their location. When they see the two holding her unconscious body in the boat, shouting “we’ve got your friend” somehow sends the wrong message. The college students run away, and in the morning regroup, Chad expressing that they should take matters into their own hands, while some of the more level-headed among them suggest getting the police involved. Dale attempts to nurse Allison, comforting her with his dog, and his board game collection, while Tucker attempts to clear the yard foliage with a chainsaw by himself, agitating a bee hive and accidentally appearing like a maniac to the onlooking students. A few of them attempt to kill Tucker, but end up killing themselves in the process, and Tucker is mortified, as any normal person would be.

Returning inside, Tucker tells Dale and Allison that her friends appear to be in a suicide pact, and that they killed themselves in front of him. The three are all aghast at the idea, Allison believing this to all be a misunderstanding. Tucker and Dale realize how bad this looks for them, however. (I was starting to wonder if this movie would acknowledge the trope it’s riffing on or not!) The two decide they need to dispose of the bodies before the police arrive, but are caught in the act. The sheriff, having heard the kids’ side of the story, finds the duo covered in blood. He cautiously enters the cabin with them where they explain the situation, and surprisingly, the sheriff believes them. Just as the sheriff is about to clarify things with the students outside, that shoddy cabin carpentry comes into play, and the sheriff ends up with a nail board in his head. He stumbles back to the police vehicle, spring breakers screaming inside while he tries to gurgle out a distress call before the signals in his brain catch up to his body, and he flops to the ground.

From here, the spring breakers feel justified in responding violently, and things escalate quickly. The core joke that the two groups continue to misgauge each other is stretched about as far as it can reasonably go, with Allison becoming incapacitated again at inopportune times to keep from explaining the situation to her friends, but the idea doesn’t feel tired by the time things unravel. Eventually Allison attempts to mediate a conversation between Dale and Chad, but Chad’s story painting himself as the scion of a family traumatized by hillbillies makes it clear that peace was never an option. He lights Tucker and Dale’s cabin ablaze and is horribly burned across half his body in the process. It’s an interesting scene; Chad’s hatred literally transforms him into a monster, exemplifying how hate is the “evil” referred to in the title of this movie, not any one character. The thesis of Tucker and Dale vs Evil seems to be that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but Chad’s arc goes further, demonstrating that the hatred isn’t inert, it changes you, making you the monster.

Tucker and Dale, unfortunately, doesn’t trust the audience enough to really get this message, so they make it explicit with an odd twist at the end. Allison and Dale find an old newspaper, and are dismayed to learn that Chad’s father didn’t die in the incident so many years ago, he was the murderer… which would mean Chad is a hillbilly! See what I mean? It feels like one too many steps to say Chad is somehow tied to the genetic destiny of hillbillies. Finding out Chad’s dad was the murderer isn’t so much the twist as the realization that Chad’s dad was a hillbilly is, and I don’t mean to make a big deal of it, but that kind of bothered me. Sure, it’s ironic that Chad is a hillbilly, but it also implies that maybe he’s the crazy murderer because his dad was one too, and in a movie that spends so much time trying to tell us not to judge others for superficial reasons, that feels… flat? Out of sync? I don’t know.

Moreover (and maybe I’m just missing that this is the gag), is being a hillbilly a genetic trait? I know there are jokes about inbreeding in other media, but is hillbillyhood something you need some sort of anti-pedigree to achieve? The traits Dale and Tucker exhibit to be profiled as hillbillies are cultural; they have accents, they wear suspenders, they drive a pickup truck, but if this is what the defining characteristics of a hillbilly are, they can all be learned or opted into. So what does it mean to call Chad a hillbilly if he doesn’t exhibit any of these characteristics? The movie treats Chad’s animosity towards hillbillies like a subconscious self-hatred, but I read Chad as having an inferiority complex, and needing to take out his anger on another group. This plot thread feels messy, and I think I would have been more satisfied if they had left the events of the past to be a lingering trauma.

Ultimately, Tucker and Dale vs Evil was a lot of fun to watch. It was a punchy, lightweight comedy that managed to capture that horror vibe without settling into something too scary. All of the kills in this movie are played for laughs, and the actors bring a brightness to the dark set that keeps the whole thing from ever feeling too grim. The scope of the plot was a lot smaller than I expected given the grandiose title, but I can’t say I would change it. The cast was fun, Tyler Labine brings a lot of loveable bear energy to his part as Dale, but for me the highlight was seeing Alan Tudyk in a completely different role from his usual fare. The movie has a core premise, it sticks to it, and does a very competent job of telling the story. It wasn’t exceptional, but I could see this becoming one of my go-tos if I’m hosting a party and need to put something on next October.