If you’re a fan of the comedy-horror genre (Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland) then you’re in for a treat with the hilarious Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. Tucker and Dale aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but they’re a decent couple of small town guys looking to spend a peaceful weekend starting to fix up the mountain cabin Tucker recently bought.
Little do they realize, even while looking at a wall of newspaper clippings about serial murders in the area that’s posted in the cabin, it was once the lair of a notorious psycho killer. Again, not the sharpest tools in the shed, they figure whoever owned the cabin last was just a news hound.
As the hapless pair get to work, a gaggle of teens set up their party camp nearby. The accident-prone teens suffer a string of deadly mishaps that seem to implicate the totally innocent and totally baffled Tucker and Dale. The more terrified the teens become of the mountain men as their numbers dwindle, the harder Tucker and Dale try to help them, and the higher the body count climbs. It’s a comedy of errors like you’ve never seen, and it’s a riot!
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is free to rent for Amazon Prime members, and $2.99 to rent or $9.99 to buy for non-Prime members.
Attack the Block is another excellent comedy most of us here in the States have never heard of because it’s a foreign film, from the U.K. In this movie, a tough-talking but largely harmless gang of teen boys find themselves defending their housing project from a far-from-harmless drug dealer, a bunch of misguided cops and an invading alien horde with only their wits and whatever weapons they can improvise from their sports equipment and household goods. Reviewer Whitt Patrick Pond says:
I have to say that Attack The Block – written and directed by Joe Cornish – is a pleasant surprise on a number of levels. Given the premise, this could easily have been just another cliched alien invasion movie, but believe me, it is most definitely not. Two things immediately make Attack The Block a cut above any of the myriad films of that overworked genre: 1) As the writer, Cornish actually put a lot of thought into the script that makes this film fresh and imaginative, and (2) as director, Cornish was willing to take chances with his characters not being the usual earnestly cute ‘safe’ kids from American suburbia.
The basic situation behind Attack The Block is that, for some reason, alien beings are suddenly landing (crashing actually) in one of the seedier parts of London and are converging on one particular ‘council block’ (what here in the states would generally be referred to as a low-income housing project). The council block in question is home for a street gang of young hoodies who make up most of the main characters in the film, and the situation quickly evolves into a fight for survival as the kids in the gang try to evade or kill the aliens attacking their block who increasingly seem to be coming after them in particular.
Attack the Block is available to buy as a digital download for $6.99.