Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. Tonight, Monday, July 28th, we’ll be watching TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL (2020), starring Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss, Philip Granger, Brandon Jay McLaren, Chelan Simmons, Travis Nelson, Adam Beauchesne, and Eli Craig.
The plot:Two lovable hillbillies are headed to their “fixer-upper” vacation cabin to drink some beer, do some fishin’, and have a good time. But when they run into a group of preppy college kids who assume from their looks that they must be in-bred, chainsaw-wielding killers, Tucker & Dale’s vacation takes a bloody and hilarious turn for the worse.
Sierra and I have been on vacation over the last week, and we truly appreciate Lisa hosting for us while we were gone! Today, we’re both trying to get going again at work and in regular life, so I thought this horror-comedy, that I haven’t watched in many years, might be some easygoing fun! If it sounds fun to you, join us for #MondayMuggers and watch TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL. It’s on Amazon Prime! I’ve included the trailer below:
Last night, my best friend forever Evelyn and I watched the latest Lifetime film, I Killed My BFF.
(Watching a movie called I Killed My BFF with my BFF? How could that possibly go wrong?)
Why Were We Watching It?
Evelyn and I love to watch the Lifetime original series, I Killed My BFF. For those of you who may not obsess over Lifetime like we do, I Killed My BFF is a true crime show about best friends who end up killing each other. Each episode features dramatic reenactments and the fun comes from trying to guess which friend will be the murderer and which friend will end up meeting a very gruesome end.
(I know it’s probably in bad taste to refer to a true crime show as being “fun” but … oh well.)
From the minute that Evelyn and I heard that Lifetime would be airing a film version of I Killed My BFF, we simply knew we would have to watch.
(According to the imdb, I Killed My BFF was originally titled The Neighbor. I’m not sure if it was originally meant to have any connection to the I Killed My BFF series or not. If I had to guess, I would say that Lifetime bought the film and changed the title to make it appear to be a spin-off of the I Killed My BFF series, in much the same way that Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 was specifically titled to fool European audiences into thinking that it was a sequel to George Romero’s Zombi, or Dawn of the Deadas it was known here in the States.)
Also, another reason Evelyn and I were watching the movie together is because that’s what BFFs do! (Except when they’re busy killing each other, of course….)
What Was It About?
When blonde Shane (Katrina Bowden) meets redheaded Heather (Olivia Crocicchia) at the hospital, shortly after both of them have given birth, they quickly become BFFs. Unfortunately, they both have their struggles. Heather is bipolar. Shane is ambitious but poor. Of course, their biggest problem is that they are characters in a film called I Killed My BFF and that means that one of them is going to be dead by the end of the movie.
What Worked?
This was actually one of the better Lifetime films that I’ve seen this year. The film looked great, director Seth Jarrett never allowed the film to drag, and both Katrina Bowden and Olivia Crocicchia gave good performances. (Olivia Crocicchia, in particular, was heartbreaking in some of her vulnerable moments.) Even the film’s score was pretty good! All in all, this film was exactly what we want when we watch a Lifetime true crime movie.
What Did Not Work?
Part of the fun of I Killed My BFF: The Series is that you’re never quite sure which BFF is going to die until the last few minutes of each episode. Unfortunately, the commercials for I Killed My BFF: The Movie revealed, ahead of time, which BFF was going to die. They served as a HUGE spoiler.
Though it may seem nitpicky, by the time the murder occurred, Heather and Shane were no longer really friends. This film should have been called I Killed My Ex-BFF.
“Oh my God! Just like us!” Moments
Okay, so obviously you know that you’re taking a risk when you and your BFF decide to watch a movie called I Killed My BFF. But it was still kinda freaky how much Evelyn and I had in common with Shane and Heather. For instance, Heather had red hair and so do I! Evelyn has pretty blonde hair and so did Shane! Heather took a “gazillion meds” and so do I! Evelyn looks good in red and so did Shane! It was uncanny and a little disturbing!
After watching the movie, I assured Evelyn that I would never murder her and, after thinking about it for a disturbingly long time, Evelyn agreed that she would probably never murder me. But then, every episode of I Killed My BFF begins with the BFFs saying the exact same thing! Listen, I love my BFF but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t spend all night looking over my shoulder.
Lessons Learned
Be careful when it comes to picking a BFF. Apparently, some people just can’t handle the pressure of being a best friend forever.
So, last night, my boyfriend and I watched Nurse 3D because, based on the trailer that was released way back in January, we thought that it would be a sexy, fun, and enjoyably lurid movie. Do you remember that trailer? In case you need a reminder, here it is:
So, we finally got around to watching the movie and oh my God, you guys — sometimes trailers lie! I know, I know — it’s a shock. I’m still struggling to deal with it myself!
Actually, technically, the trailer for Nurse 3D doesn’t really lie. The trailer tells us that the film is about a nurse who is obsessed with another nurse and who spends the majority of the film wearing only a bra. And that’s true! But, somehow, the trailer also makes the film look like it’s a lot more fun than it actually is. The trailer reveals that Nurse 3D is meant to be something of a satirical tribute to the exploitation films of the past. What it doesn’t reveal is that the film largely does not work.
In Nurse 3D, Paz de la Huerta plays Abby Russell, a nurse who also happens to be a serial killer. When we first meet her, she’s wandering through a club in a black lace, see-through dress. In a narration that de la Huerta delivers in an emotionless drone, Abby explains that men are a disease that has been created in an “alcoholic petri dish” and that is now “infecting innocent vaginas.”
“There is only one cure for the married cock,” Abby tells us, “Only me. I’m the nurse.”
Abby, we discover, specializes in murdering married men who are on the verge of committing adultery. Sounds like a good idea for a movie, right? Well, don’t get too attached to it because, once we get through the opening credits, that entire storyline pretty much disappears.
Instead, Abby becomes obsessed with a new nurse named Danni Rogers (Katrina Bowden). One night, after Danni both has a fight with her boyfriend (Corbin Bleu) and gets yelled at by a jerk of a doctor (played by Judd Nelson), Abby invites Danni out to a club. Abby gets Danni drunk and drugged and soon they’re making out on the dance floor. The next morning, Danni wakes up in Abby’s bed. When Danni refuses to spend the day with Abby and quickly leaves, Abby reacts by trying to destroy Danni’s life…
And that plot line goes on for a while until, eventually, the filmmakers remembered that this was supposed to be a 3D film and, with the exception of one man hurtling towards the camera after being tossed off a rooftop, nothing in the film has really lent itself to whole 3D thing. So, suddenly, Abby goes from being coolly calculating to being batshit insane, essentially so that she’ll have an excuse to toss medical equipment straight at the camera.
(I’m going to guess that this all probably looked really impressive in 3D but since we were watching the film in 2D, who cares?)
And then, eventually, the movie ends.
I like what Nurse 3D was trying to do. The film is obviously meant to pay homage to the classic exploitation films to the past. That was obvious in everything from the overwritten narration to the hilariously fetishized nurses uniforms to the unapologetically sordid nature of the entire plot.
However, the film’s execution left a lot to be desired. For all of it’s attempts to celebrate over-the-top exploitation, the film never quite seems to understand what makes those films so memorable in the first place. Perhaps if Nurse 3D had stuck with being a film about a nurse who kills cheating husbands, the film would have worked. But, instead, it just becomes yet another film about an obsessive friend who turns out to be a psycho and who, fortunately for her, is lucky enough to be surrounded by people too stupid to pick up on the most obvious of clues.
And it doesn’t help that, whatever the joke was that Nurse 3D was trying to tell, it’s obvious that Paz de la Huerta was not in on it. In many ways, her character is meant to be a throwback to the great and deadly femme fatales of yesterday but it takes more than having a good body to be a femme fatale. You have to have style and that’s totally what her performance is missing. Scarlett Johansson could have worked wonders with the role of Abby Russell but Paz de la Huerta just seems to be lost.
That’s actually a pretty good description of Nurse 3D. It started out on the right track but, obviously, it lost its way.
One thing I like about genre films is the fact that, whether they’re good or bad, they mostly accomplish the part about entertaining it’s audience. For the good to great ones they don’t just entertain but raise the genre to new heights. For the bad ones they seem to entertain in unexpected ways. How often have one watched a bad genre film, realize it’s bad and still just roll with it, laughing at it becoming part of it’s appeal. We wouldn’t have gotten years and years of Rifftrax and MST3K without enjoying the badness of awful genre films. Then there are genre films which takes the very well-worn tropes of the genre. The very things we as an audience groan and snicker at and manages to turn it into a love-letter to the very thing they’re making fun of.
The horror-comedy Tucker & Dale vs. Evil takes the backwoods horror which has been a major staple of the slasher subgenre for over a quarter-century and tips it on it’s head to create a horror comedy that never runs out of laughs and still manages to show cringe-inducing death scenes. It stars Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine in the roles of Tucker and Dale. We have two well-meaning “hillbillies” from the backwoods of West Virginia on their way to Tucker’s recently bought “fixer-upper” of a vacation home who come across a group of obnoxious college kids looking to spend the weekend on the shore of the very lake our two intrepid heroes’ vacation also sits off of. Through some misunderstanding between the very sweet-natured Dale who tries to befriend one of the pretty college girls in the group we see the beginning of events that will see death and mayhem visited upon both groups throughout the film.
We get the mandatory story telling us about how twenty years ago during Memorial Day a group of similar college kids were massacred by a couple of hillbillies on the very shores of the lake with only one survivor to tell the tale. This tale becomes the reason why the college kids start trying to “defend” themselves from Tucker and Dale who they thought kidnapped one of the girls in their group when in fact they had just rescued her from drowning. One by one each college kid dies in horrible fashion in their attempt to take on the oblivious Tucker and Dale who begin to think the group were on a suicide pact and means to take them down as well.
The film really does a great job of playing on the well-worn conventions of slasher films and making each such scenario play out in a way that if someone caught the scene a few seconds after it had already started they would think Tucker and Dale were trying to kill these kids. Each kill have just enough gore to satisfy horror fans so used to slasher films, but also funny enough every cringe was followed up by laughs.
One thing the film also had going for it was the chemistry between Tudyk and Labine as Tucker and Dale. They play off each other quite naturally that it’s not a stretch to believe these two were truly life-long friends who would brave the rush of misguided college kids to save each other. Even the college girl with the heart of gold, Allie (played by Katrina Bowden), adds to the film’s good-natured fun as she tries to explain to her friends that everything which has been going on (all the death and destruction) was all just a misunderstanding. Another thing which helps make the two leads in the film quite sympathetic has to be how obnoxious the kids really were who look down on the so-called “mountain folk” of the region because of their appearance thus their lack of education.
Eli Craig took three years to make Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, but the end result was all worth the wait. The film follows in the great traditions of horror-comedies of the past by never winking cynically at the audience at how smart it is, but letting the basic premise of the story play out as simply as possible. It helps to have a great duo in Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine in the roles of the Tucker and Dale. This film may not make many critics running to proclaim it as a milestone in the genre but it does succeed in entertaining it’s audience and just ending up being one hilarious 90 minutes of campy horror.
Through the Shattered Lens 