Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil: A Netflix Diamond In The Rough

Neflix is built upon a backbone primarily made from two groups: Netflix Originals and the worst movies you've ever seen. There may be plenty of inbetween categories there, but boil it down and those two generate a lot of traffic. One night, while on the search for a terrible movie to watch, I found myself looking at a movie title that could only produce a downright terrible movie:

"Evil just messed with the wrong hillbillies" being the line that defines the entire thing, it seemed almost impossible to turn out well. Oh boy, how wrong was I.

The movie opens with a few scenes of optimistic "hillbilly" friends, Tucker and Dale, trying to get to their vacation home in the woods, and a bunch of college kids going to the same area for a little vacation of their own. An encounter between the two groups sets off a string of misunderstandings that lead towards all Hell breaking loose. Along the way, there are quotable scenes to last an entire week, making this movie an experience beyond its glorious 1 hour 28 minutes run time. To sound way more technical than it really is, Tucker & Dale is a fantastic satire of the horror genre. By giving the "killers" an innocent side to their story, they took all of the elements of slasher flicks and turned them on their heads to make them utterly hilarious.

That being said, Tucker & Dale goes beyond its primary purpose to bring up some other subjects you wouldn't expect from a comedy film you find on Netflix.

****spoilers ahead****

One of the greatest things about the movie is that it depicts fear and how it controls people so well. Everything in the movie happens because the college kids let their fear of the hillbillies, and their lack of knowledge about them, control their actions. These actions also happen to be terribly executed because, well, it's a comedy. Still, the fact that it took until the last quarter of the film to even start communicating, and that this therapy session of sorts was broken up by one student busting into the place with a weed whip running, shows just how easily the college kids were pushed into killing each other and themselves by accident.

On the other side of the same token, this really shows how absolutely crucial communication is. There were several times where communication between the two sides would have ended the entire conflict and everything would have been hunky-dory. Instead, the college kids think Tucker and Dale are trying to kill them as well as Ali, and Tucker and Dale think the college kids are in some kind of suicide pact.

We all could use some tea and some not killing each other.

Taking that a step further, Tucker & Dale completely calls out the "us vs. them" dichotomy by making the only person who actively uses it, Chad, the villain. Being the stereotypical douchebag with a violent, psychotic twist, Chad made it known from the beginning that he only saw the hillbillies and the college students; individuals meant nothing, only their labels. Then the movie completely spits in the face of that dichotomy when it's revealed that Chad is "part hillbilly, too", causing him to freak out and fall out a window. He was so caught up in what it meant to be a "hillbilly" that he ended up breaking himself, telling the audience with a final, resounding voice that it's not about what it seems, it's about how things are. Plus it does all of that while presenting the fact that "hillbillies" can also be smart -- that manual labor workers can be intelligent, too. What a concept, mainstream Hollywood.

Going far beyond what I could've possibly expected, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil graces Netflix with its presence. May we all find peace in our vacation homes.