Tucker and Dale vs Evil (R)
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Caution: potential spoilers.

This was released in 2011, but I didn't see it until 2026. It's basically a comedy of errors, but all the errors happen to be horrific. I expected to enjoy the movie, but I actually ended up liking it even more than I expected to. It certainly helps that it stars a couple of actors I was already a fan of from other roles. But really, the whole thing is pretty funny. It's got a good concept, and it executes that concept really well.

It begins with a bit of found footage, of a reporter and cameraman going to investigate the scene of a rash of killings, after the police had left. They end up being killed right away. We then flash back to three days earlier (Memorial Day), when a group of college friends are going on a camping trip in the West Virginia woods. Before they get to the woods, they encounter a pair of hillbillies named Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine). The kids are freaked out by the duo, especially after Tucker encourages Dale to approach them and try to talk to the girls. Dale is shy and awkward, which leads him to come off as vaguely creepy. So the kids pile back into their truck and continue on their way. Meanwhile, Tucker has just bought a ramshackle cabin in the woods, as a vacation home, which he and Dale plan to fix up. (I was kind of disappointed to never learn where Tucker and Dale were on vacation from, or what they do for a living. I thought they might not actually be hillbillies at all, but apparently they were. But they happened to be harmless, normal folks, wherever they were from. Which I assume probably wasn't that far away.)

Anyway, one of the college kids, Chad, tries to hit on his friend Allison, but she rejects him. Later, he tells a scary story to all his friends about another group of college kids who had supposedly been killed in those same woods, twenty years ago. We later find out that it wasn't just a story, and the only survivor was Chad's mother, who had been institutionalized. After his story, the kids all decide to go for a swim. Tucker and Dale happen to be in a boat nearby, fishing. When Allison is stripping while standing on a high rock, she notices them, gets freaked out, slips and falls into the water. When she doesn't come back up, Dale decides to rescue her. They intend to bring her back to her friends, but her friends assume they kidnapped her, and run away in fear for their own lives. So, Tucker and Dale take Allison back to their cabin, to let her recover from the bump she took to the head when she fell. When she wakes up, she's scared at first, but it doesn't take long for Dale to put her at ease, and they begin to bond.

Meanwhile, Chad and the others are determined to "rescue" Allison from the hillbillies. In their efforts, one by one they accidentally kill themselves. Unfortunately, none of their friends see how they died, so they assume they were killed by the hillbillies. When Tucker and Dale find out that several of the kids have died, Tucker surmises that they have some kind of suicide pact, and that they want to kill Allison. Chad remains determined to not only save Allison, but get revenge against the hillbillies. We learn that he has a vendetta against all hillbillies, because of what happened 20 years ago. Which, as it turns out, wasn't exactly what he'd always been told. As the death toll continues to mount and Chad falls deeper into madness, Tucker and Dale become increasingly frantic. And that's all I want to reveal of the plot. I fear I may have said too much already, but I've left out a lot of details.

Anyway... there's ultimately a happy ending for Tucker, Dale, and Allison. I mean, not completely happy, because Tucker's cabin ended up being destroyed, and all of Allison's friends were killed. But happy enough, I guess, after all the carnage is finally over. The whole movie is redonkulous, in the best way. I thought Tucker and Dale and Allison were all really good characters, and I particularly liked both the friendship between the title characters, and the relationship that developed between Dale and Allison. And, you know, just the whole flipping of horror movie tropes and expectations, which is probably the best such flipping since the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. In a way, I'd say this movie's core concept was even more fun than the one in "Buffy", even if I slightly prefer that movie overall.