Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

31 Days of Horror: Day 3

There are damn few good horror-comedies.  Fact.  Sure, there are a lot of films that can be loosely categorized as horror-comedies, but most of them are either stupid spoof movies (Stan Helsing) or have very, very dark humor (American Psycho).  The last horror-comedy I can recall enjoying was Club Dread, and it has been a good long while since that came out.  I've tried a few movies that have attempted to master this unique genre blend, but I've had bad luck lately.  Oh, that reminds me --- Rubber sucks.  But then I saw this trailer and thought I'd give Tucker & Dale vs. Evil a try.

In case you didn't catch the gist of this plot from the trailer, here's the basics.  A group of coeds are going on a camping trip in the remote woods.  Following in horror movie tradition, these coeds are annoying douchebags.

Do you need more proof than the popped collar?

On their way to the the campground, the youngsters are frightened by some creepy hillbilly rednecks (I know, I know...Department of Redundancy Department).  The rednecks, Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine), aren't doing anything too scary --- just staring, making vaguely threatening conversation, and brandishing weapons --- but it's pretty obvious that the coeds are hearing dueling banjos in their heads. 

Okay, sure, I get that

Of course, it turns out that Tucker and Dale are actually two very nice best friends.  They're just hillbillies and they don't know how to communicate with preppie jerks.  The pair are going to their new vacation home, which looks like a murder cottage; they like to think of it as a fixer-upper.  Tucker and Dale's place happens to be on the same lake that the kids are preparing their weekend of unsupervised promiscuous fun.  It also happens to be in an area where, twenty years ago, a group of college-aged campers were brutally murdered by unknown hillbillies. 

Edit: that should read "brutally and awesomely murdered"

With that background, it was inevitable that there be a misunderstanding between the hillbillies and the coeds.  Pretty soon, the kids are acting like they are in a slasher movie with Tucker and Dale as the killers.  What are a couple of sweet country boys supposed to do when faced with that?

Is there a Plan B?

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil definitely relies on the acting abilities of its leading men.  While I wouldn't say that Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine are great actors, they were pretty entertaining here.  Both had a good grasp on the kind of timing needed for this sort of comedy and both were able to look surprisingly threatening when the script required it.  I was especially impressed with that last part, because neither actor has ever been particularly intimidating in anything else I've seen them in.  On top of that, Labine was pretty adorable.

Look at them.  They wouldn't hurt a fly!

Most of the coeds are played by actors without a lot going on in the talent department.  Jesse Moss and Chelan Simmons, for instance, were cannon fodder in Final Destination 3 and Brandon Jay McLaren was once a Power Ranger.  Katrina Bowden was good, though.  Her part didn't require much as far as line delivery went, but she did a solid job with the physical humor.

...like when she became a giant and farted out Tucker and Dale.  Note: I'm not bilingual.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was directed and co-written by Eli Craig.  If you're not familiar with his work, here's a quick refresher: you might have seen him as a young Tommy Lee Jones in Space Cowboys and...that's it.  He hasn't written, directed, or starred in any other feature-length films.  When you take that into account, I think Craig did a pretty damn good job with his first effort.  The nods to classic horror tradition/cliches are done well, the soundtrack and sets felt like they belonged in a genuine 80s horror movie, and the gore was very good for a movie focusing on laughs.

It's funny because someone died

The movie's pretty funny, too.  It's not all that witty --- the laughs tend to come from the death scenes and Dale trying to figure things out --- but it's certainly funnier than a horror spoof would be.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a comedy that is playing up horror cliches and turning them on their head.  This is clearly being done by people with a lot of affection for the genre, and that fondness for horror movies is obvious throughout the film.  However, this movie is, at its core, a comedy. 

Ha ha ha!  Die hipster, die!

Yes, there is a lot of fake blood, but this is a movie written and directed to make you laugh.  In that, it is fairly successful.  It didn't make me laugh out loud too often, but it was a very cute movie with some likable characters in it.

Exhibit A

And that's fine.  I'm not a huge fan of "cute," so some of that novelty wore off on me as the film wound down to the less amusing final act, but this movie was always enjoyable to watch.  Had it added some legitimate suspense or horror to the mix, this might have been a little better.  As it stands, this is a pretty clever comedy that pokes fun at some standard horror stuff.  It's not absolutely hilarious, but certainly worth a watch.  If you're trying to introduce someone to the funnier/campier side of horror and you don't think they're ready for Evil Dead 2, this would be a pretty friendly option.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the exhausting title to the seventh entry in the Planet of the Apes series and it serves as a sort of reboot, as well as a prequel.  I know how much you like prequels and reboots!  I was not looking forward to this one whatsoever, if only because the last effort to revitalize this franchise was a huge disappointment for me, and that movie had a much better cast and director.  This director had made only one other movie, and I had never even heard of it.  What would it take to make Rise even halfway decent? 

Hint: more than a tire swing

Well, a different focus, for starters.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes begins with brilliant scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) experimenting a new drug on chimpanzees.  You see, Will's father, Charles (John Lithgow), has Alzheimer's and Will is trying to find a cure.  In other words, his drug will repair the brain, or enchance the brain if no damage is present.  When Will finally finds a chimp that responds positively to the drug, he pleads with his boss (David Oyelowo) to approve human testing; boss-man agrees to give Will a chance to convince the Board of Trustees.  On the very day of Will's presentation, the super-chimp (dubbed "Bright Eyes") goes, um, bananas, attacking people and destroying property.  Obviously, the drug is bad and all the chimps must be killed.  But wait...!  Will and his monkey handler guy (Tyler Labine) discover a teeny, tiny baby chimp in Bright Eyes' cage --- Bright Eyes wasn't drug crazy, she was protecting her child!  Aww...!

Free shipping?  Why wouldn't you buy a monkey?

So, yeah, that was tragic.  Will won't let the baby monkey get all murderdeathkilled, though.  He does what any scientist in a similar situation would do --- he experiments on the monkey because its momma was taking some crazy drugs when it was in the womb sneaks it out of the building and takes it home with him.  This was going to just be a temporary solution, but Will's dad seemed to like the monkey, so it stuck around.  More than that, this monkey turned out to be super-smart.  In fact, little Caesar (motion-capture-acted by Andy Serkis) is brilliant enough to convince Will to steal some of his experimental drug and try it out on his dad, on the sly.

"Pizza!  Pizza!"

Everything seems to be coming up Will for a while, but eventually Caesar is discovered by the neighbors and Will is forced to give him up.  And this is where the movie gets interesting.  Up until this point, Rise of the Planet of the Apes has been about Will raising Caesar almost like a son.  From this point on, the film is about Caesar becoming a man.  Well, not literally.

The human actors in Rise of the Planet of the Apes are just okay.  I don't completely buy James Franco as a brilliant scientist, but I thought he handled his role fairly well.  Freida Pinto's character didn't add a whole lot to the story, but she was also fine.  John Lithgow was pretty good as Will's father, but I would have preferred seeing his character's big breakdown happen at night.  David Oyelowo was less impressive as the greedy and ruthless science boss; his character could have legitimately had a mustache-twirling scene where he counted his imaginary money.  Brian Cox plays a small supporting role and is decent, although I think he has played the same basic bastard character a few times over by now.  This is the first first big post-Harry Potter role for Tom Felton, and he is once again stuck playing a villain.  I really wanted to like Felton here, but I couldn't wait to see him die.

If only for his lame "It's a madhouse" line

As the primary chimp, Caesar, Andy Serkis was phenomenal.  It's too bad that his acting isn't considered legit by most big-time awards shows, because his motion-capture work is just astounding here.  Really, the emotional weight of the film depends on Serkis' physical acting and he does not disappoint.  Shifting the focus of the story onto a monkey --- without a human to narrate to the audience --- was risky and potentially hilarious (in the wrong way), but Andy Serkis absolutely made this film.

Now, kiss

Director Rupert Wyatt did an impressive job with the actors who were imitating monkeys; the rest of the film he could have handled better.  The second half of the movie, which focuses almost exclusively on Caesar's struggles, is pretty great.  Monkeys fighting each other, monkeys fighting Draco Malfoy, monkeys being monkeys...the only thing missing was poop throwing.  Not all directors can handle CGI directing, but Wyatt did not appear to have a problem with that.  The first half of the movie, though, occasionally veered into the realm of ridiculousness.  Not all of it is Wyatt's fault, but as director, he should have prevented some of this.

Let's start with the title/tag line.

Okay, that's a pretty cool bit of promo work, but it (and the movie's trailer) definitely imply a hell of a lot more fighting and, well, revolution than the final product provides.  There are only two definite ape-on-human deaths in this film, despite a swarm (a flock?  A pack?  A murder?) of apes fighting the police on the Golden Gate Bridge.  Those scenes were entertaining, but if you went into the movie hoping for a lot more action like that, you would be sorely disappointed.  Instead of there being a "revolution," SPOILER ALERT: the apes go into the redwood forest.  Humanity then apparently suffers a pandemic during the closing credits.  That's right, the deadliest part of this movie happens off-camera.  Really, that was the most disappointing realization I had with Rise of the Planet of the Apes; it wasn't so much a "rising" as it was winning by default.

Fact: apes love railings

That ending would have been a slight let down in the best of times, but when you combine that with a supposedly smart story doing many stupid things, things start to get ugly.  I won't dive into my first problem with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in depth, but I have to mention it.  This movie takes place over a span of eight years.  Eight years!  And the only character that has even a slight cosmetic change in all that time is Caesar.  I'm not saying that Freida Pinto needed a perm or that James Franco should have had a mullet, but every human character is static over those eight years --- they have the same appearance, the same jobs, live in the same homes, and apparently have the same opinions.  If anything argues that this movie is about the CGI monkeys, it is that indifference to character development.

Slightly attracted strangers, or longtime lovers?  This could be any scene in the movie.

My biggest problem had to do with the way Will's scientist gig worked.  I'm not a high-profile scientist tasked with the job of creating something new, safe, and ridiculously profitable, but I imagine security at places where that sort of thing happens would be fairly strict.  Not only is Will able to sneak out a baby chimp in a perforated shoebox on "Kill the Monkeys" day, but he steals what amounts to dozens of canisters of his super-secret brain drug.  At least they hid stuff inside shaving cream cans in Jurassic Park --- he just puts them in his pocket.  And does nobody take an interest in Will's life at work?  "Gee, Will, it sure sucks that the company wants you to stop researching the drug that might cure your dad's Alzheimer's...oh?  Your dad's much better now?  That...um...shouldn't happen, but...great!  Are we missing some of the brain drug canisters?"

There are moments of Rise of the Planet of the Apes that are truly entertaining.  Caesar's schemes were pretty cool and the CGI/motion-capture expressions were fantastic.  But this is a clumsy movie.  It has ham-fisted references to the original film (although the spacecraft bit was subtle and cool) and extremely shallow human characters running around in a plot with many convenient logic holes.  I can't overlook my utter surprise that this movie wound up entertaining me, but I was disappointed in the overall direction of the picture as well as its numerous moments of stupidity.  Given the same overall story and a less ridiculous script, I would probably give this movie eight stars.  But Rise of the Planet of the Apes sucks hard on the stupid lever, and I can't ignore that.