Plays its markers a bit too early

Rating: Null/10 (29 January 2020)

Tucker and Dale vs Evil has a great premise. What if those crazy backwoods hillbillies - who are probably cannibals - you see in every other horror movie were actually the victims of the film? Now that's pure gold right there.
And the early scenes of this film have some really great jokes, stemming from that initial idea. There's an especially great scene involving a chainsaw and a wasp nest, which caused me to crack myself up. If this film could have kept up such quality throughout its entire run-time, we would be talking about a new horror comedy cult classic.
Unfortunately all the best jokes are in the initial half of the film. The second half loses a lot of its humour - although it makes up for it a little bit with surprising amounts of heartwarming - and becomes a more straightforward horror slasher film.
Not helping the matters is the actual villain of the movie, who's so over the top psycho that it doesn't make any sense that he would be able to function in a normal society. This is a dude who would stand in the corner of a party, openly licking a knife, cackling while he does it. How are these other people friends with him? Sure, it's supposed to be a joke how over the top he is, but it just doesn't make any sense. The film would have worked fine without his psychosis. Just let it be a movie about a huge, colossal misunderstanding. Like the first half of the film.
Still, the film has passion and charm behind it. Some of the jokes are really good, as are somewhat surprisingly some of the characters. The villain is terrible, but who knows, you might like how bat guano bonkers he is.