Butler's Cinema Scene

Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine...rural oafs

“TUCKER & DAVE vs. EVIL”  My rating: C+ (Opening Sept. 30 at the Screenland Crossroads)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The sly joke at the heart of “Tucker & Dave vs. Evil” is that the guys who are usually the heavies in backwoods horror stories — the bib overall-wearing, inbred hillbilly oafs — are the heroes this time around.

But nobody can figure it out.

Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dave (Tyler Labine) are two good ol’ boy idiots who do odd jobs and have just achieved their lifelong dream of owning a vacation home in the country.

Said home is a ramshackle cabin deep in the tick-infested woods, but for our proud mouth-breathing heroes it might very well be a beachfront estate in the Hamptons.

The boys’ weekend sojourn takes a weird turn when they rescue a pretty college girl, Allison (Katrina Bowdon), from drowning in their scum-covered pond.

Problem is, her young companions have seen way too many horror movies and imagine that Tucker and Dave are degenerate mountain men who have made Allison their sex slave. At the urging of the macho-infused Chad (Jesse Moss), these Ivy Leage morons lay siege to the cabin.

Of course, they’re college kids, not a SWAT team, and their best efforts at heroics go insanely wrong. One young fellow, charging Tucker while he innocently attempts to clean up the property, takes a header into a huge wood chipper with misty-red results.

Dale and Tucker are appalled by the mayhem as the bodies start to stack up. These college kids find the goriest ways of accidentally offing themselves. Worse, they know that they’ll be blamed.

“Tucker & Dave” takes a while to get started, but once it does, there are some sublimely funny moments. My favorite is when Tucker, attempting to cut down a tree, incurs the wrath of a bee colony and so goes racing madly through the woods waving his chain saw. The college kids, of course, are sure they’ve stumbled into a real-life “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

| Robert W. Butler