Brilliant idea for a short comedy sketch

Rating: 5/10 (22 May 2017)

The premise of this movie, in which a couple of helpful hillbillies are mistaken by panicked college kids for serial killers, is absolutely brilliant, and I was very excited when I saw the trailer. But alas, the movie itself wasn't really particularly funny, and after about a third of it I got bored and started skipping through looking for funny bits I never found.
Once you've got the idea of this movie it doesn't really have any place to go. People will die in predictable ways and the film will offer up all sorts of genre-appropriate clichés. The most interesting idea involves an attempt at conflict resolution, but once again the execution fails a good idea.
My feeling is this movie chose a center ground when it would have been better at one of the extremes. Tucker and Dale don't quite seem like real people, but they aren't that broadly drawn either, and the kids are too generic to be interesting. I think the movie either should have gone full Scary Movie, with the silliness ramped up to 11, or it should have made Tucker and Dale feel like genuine backwoods types caught in a bad situation and explored the way we make assumptions about one another. Of those two choices, I'm inclined to prefer the former, but either would be better than the actual movie.