TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL
4/5 Stars
Now Streaming on Netflix

     Horror has a rich history with comedy. Shaun of the Dead and Idle Hands are high-spirited hybrids. Return of the Living Dead, An American Werewolf in London, and Gremlins all have pretty overtly comedic tones. Even the first third of The Birds is almost indistinguishable from a romantic comedy, and that was after Abbott and Costello had some interesting meetings. By comparison the notoriously gory "slasher" sub-genre has only recently begun to flirt with humor. Perhaps something about humans killing other humans just doesn't lend itself to laughs. Nevertheless, over the past few years several slasher films have taken tentative first steps into comedy. From Jason X's holographic Crystal Lake tribute to Hostel's gum gang, horror helmers have been experimenting with genre crossover pretty regularly since the self-referential boom of the 90s. In fact, this trend has been so ubiquitous that Hatchet's ad campaign promoted it as "classic" horror simply because a disfigured mute was allowed to kill college kids without winking at the audience.
     If the last decade and a half have been the courtship between slasher and slapstick, one could view Tucker And Dale vs. Evil as the consummation: a comedy that successfully embraces the bloodshed of the dead teenager films while retaining its sense of humor. Tucker and Dale is a comedy of errors that finds our hapless titular heroes mistaken for cabin-dwelling homicidal psychos. If that premise doesn't already have you smiling, you'll probably find the whole exercise tiresome. The lengths to which the writers have gone to keep this farce going are alternately side-splitting and suspension of disbelief-straining, much like watching a Fawlty Towers marathon. Ultimately the movie works. It's bloody. It's funny. It's a comedy hyphenate. No, wait- a slasher slash.