Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil

As Tucker (Alan Tudyk) sums it up to a county sheriff (Philip Granger), “Well, hidey ho, officer, we’ve had a doozy

of a day.’’ Since he’s holding the bottom half of a college student as he says this - the upper half is still in a nearby wood chipper - you can’t blame a fellow for jumping to conclusions. But Tucker and his less worldly best friend Dale (Tyler Labine) have just gone to the backcountry for a little fishing and to check out Tucker’s new purchase of a very old cabin. Is it their fault that kids these days believe every hook-handed urban legend they’re told and every gore flick they see?

Of course not. Many of the richest laughs in “Tucker & Dale’’ come from the panic-stricken students misreading the visual cues with which they’re presented. When Tucker rounds the cabin corner doing a demented chain saw dance, only the audience has seen him accidentally cut into a beehive in a log. When they overhear Dale bragging that he keeps beating Ally (Katrina Bowden), the pretty coed the two appear to have taken prisoner, how are they to know he means at Trivial Pursuit?

Actually, Ally has bonked her head while swimming in a creek, and Tucker and Dale are caring for her until her friends show up. The slow-building romance between the hulking but tenderhearted Dale and the blonde hottie - a farm girl, it turns out - is one of the more subversively playful twists in the script by Morgan Jurgenson and director Eli Craig. So are the methods by which the kids manage to accidentally off themselves one by one, to Tucker and Dale’s horrified confusion. “I know what this is - a suicide pact,’’ says Tucker. “Oh, that makes so much sense,’’ agrees Dale.