1) Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is all about what can happen when you’re naive enough to judge a book by its cover. Indeed, it’d be pretty easy to immediately write off Eli Craig’s movie based on its strange appearance and unappealing image, and that’s exactly what the characters within the film do too. A bunch of beer-swilling teens out for a fun-filled camping trip in the woods encounter the titular duo at a gas station, and alarmed by their grizzly, slack-jawed appearance, promptly hop into their car and drive away.
What Craig’s movie so intelligently does is manipulate the typical genre cliches of the lost-in-the-woods horror movie, and point an outstretched finger towards the stupidity of so many of these types of films. In reality, Tucker and Dale are actually warm, kind, and genial hillbillies, but given how horror films have so often told us that truck-driving, beard-bearing, cabin-dwelling men are inbred masochists whose sole purpose in life is to torture anyone who unwittingly stumbles into their region, the teens in this movie think that, too.
In a bitter twist of irony, Tucker and Dale’s clumsy attempts to be hospitable lead to several of the youths disappearing, resulting in a hilarious horror-comedy that actually has much more of a of a brain than the serious films that inspired it.