a much needed, outrageously funny and heart-warming look at slasher movies (NOT Scream)

Rating: 9/10 (29 September 2012)

Sometimes a movie has to be made just to be a proper counter to so much that's come before it. I'm almost surprised this film hasn't existed before (not to say there haven't been critical analyses of horror conventions in horror comedies going back years, Student Bodies and of course the first couple of Scream movies come as good examples). But with this and Cabin in the Woods, it's hard to ever *really* go back to the way slasher movies used to be, the kind like Mother's Day or something where you got a bunch of hicks who go after seemingly helpless teens/twenty-somethings in the woods. Because here, not only are the roles reversed - the couple of hicks who have a cabin (and many sharp objects) who are suddenly the target of paranoid and freaked-out college kids - but it goes through a deconstruction of certain tropes in general.
In a way it almost goes into romantic comedy territory in small bursts, as Dale (Tyler Labine, a much needed boost after drek like Good Ol' Fashioned Orgy) saves a young girl named Allison from drowning who was part of the college pack, and, being a genuinely friendly and nice guy (if not the best at approaching them, as we see early on), gets closer to her... well, that is until the other college kids, who think he and Tucker (the always splendid Alan Tudyk) have kidnapped her in their creepy cabin, which in reality is Tucker's summer home he's remodeling. More to the point, the whole film functions in its satire like a big but sincere Looney Tunes cartoon about mis-communication. In fact, I'd love it if this was shown in intro to communications classes in colleges, aside from its entertainment value, since it goes aways to show how we as a people mess up how we relate to one another through ALL pre- conceived notions.
This isn't to say all hicks are pleasant and just want a couple of beers in a fishing boat, and not all college kids are arrogant and over-reactive morons. What Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson do so well with their script, and the subsequent direction, is keep the comedic pace so strong through so much of the film - at least the first two thirds before some revelations come forth - with a sort of 'checklist' as to the things that could happen. I kept thinking 'where could they go from here?' with how crazy it gets with the kills, which to one side are the maniac murders of Deliverance-folk and to the other side as the psychotic goals of a bunch of kids with a suicide pact(!) And yet with all of the beautiful set- ups and pay-offs of the gags, or the randomness of the VERY bloody violence (I appreciated that, and it really made it gut-bustingly funny, just for how long they would show things), it's still believable core characters that keep it going.
I loved seeing Tucker and Dale as an on-screen buddy team, though it's hard to see this going past this one movie (maybe Tucker and Dale's Chainsaw Massacre is up next?) Tudyk and Labine drive their friendship to the audience right from the start, and their humor is much more natural than what one would expect even from a more broad parody. If anything the broadest characters are the dumb sheeple-like college kids following one super-deranged kid in a polo t-shirt with some backwoods- hick murder issues. While this doesn't mean the film wont' sometimes go into some of the territory its making fun of, that is characters doing stupid things when they should know better, in context it still works and is never less than a full blown crowd-pleaser.