Tucker and Dale vs Evil.
I watched this movie recently and found it to be fairly original. It is about two simple guys who find their dream vacation in a cabin in the woods only to find that a group of college kids out for some fun misinterpret them as killer hillbillies and, in their attempts stop them, they all accidentally kill themselves, furthering their murderous image.
While copious amounts of blood and gore in conjunction with college kids out for a party isn't itself original, this film was clearly meant to mock the genre to an extent. The foreshadowing and misinterpretation starts almost immediately, when one of the guys (I'll be referring to them as guys and kids from here on out) approaches a girl at the gas station, just to say hi. In his awkwardness, he laughs when he shouldn't and forgets that he was holding a scythe, making him seem like a reaper. The cabin in the woods that they fall in love with is even filled with remnants of an old serial killer who used to live there. Still, the writers needed to have a reason for the college kids to try to defend themselves against the hillbillies, so they made the men rescue one of them from drowning in the swamp. They manage to scare the rest of the college kids off by shouting "We got your friend" as they pulled her body into their boat (they sounded so sincere).
From that point on, the writers focused on eliminating the college kids one at a time until the plot had developed enough to just blow the rest up. The characters are designed well. When not being attacked, the men talk to, care for, and treat the girl they rescued with great respect, even playing a game of trivia with her. At points, the writers took liberties in how they depict the characters' reactions to the death all around them. When the girl finally walks outside to see the gore, she still believes that the men in the cabin are telling the truth (though when one of the men started crying it was pretty convincing). And when the kids in the woods send their weakest member, armed only with a pointy stick, into the fight first when the leader of the group is busy throwing an ax at a tree with great accuracy, it just didn't make tactical sense).
Anyway, the visuals of the movie were pretty simple. The image quality seemed low but I think that was a result of the download. The colors were pretty plain, with few bright colors. The cabin was probably the best visual in the film, having been filled with newspaper articles about the murderer and a few traps. It fit the location and had the right amount of shadiness to it.
The camera angles helped make the movie work as well. Being a somewhat lower budget movie (or it looked like one), they avoided ruining it by showing close ups of the college kids as they died, tending to have the violence occurring just off screen.
Even the dog was written into the story pretty well. It's the typical angry looking dog with a good heart. It seemed to make the men seem more dangerous.
Those are some thoughts on the movie. It's time for class so I'll end it here.
