I saw this indie film last night at the Sunset Five in West Hollywood, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

Forget about all of the horror spoofs you’ve seen. This film was everything that most of those are not. That is to say that it was clever, original and well made.

The first thing you notice when seeing this film is that the two main characters, Tucker and Dale, are hillbillies with a sensitive side. They are real people with real feelings and emotions, just like everyone else, but they become victims of stereotype when they come across a group of young, good-looking college kids who are on a camping trip. Tucker and Dale are headed to a cabin they just bought in the hopes of fixing it up and turning it into a vacation home, and are very close to the spot where the college kids are camping.

Naturally, the college kids go skinny dipping at night while Tucker and Dale are fishing, and Ali, one of the college girls, sees them, gets freaked out, and falls in the water. Tucker and Dale rescue her, and yell to the others that they have their friend. Thinking they’re kidnapping her, her friends panic and run back to the campsite.

What follows is a tragic and gory comedy of errors as the college kids attack the house in an effort to “rescue” their friend, but get killed one by one in gruesome, hillbilly-esque ways (think wood chipper). For their part, Tucker and Dale have no idea what’s happening, and at first think it’s some sort of mass suicide. It isn’t until the kids get ahold of Dale and start torturing him that they realize what’s going on.

There are a couple of things that make this film so effective. First off, the premise is original and creative. It takes not one, but two genres and turns both of them on their respective ears. When looking at the trailer, it seems like a one joke movie, but it is so much more than that. The premise leads to a storyline that is well structured,  and the audience has a clear choice of good characters to root for and bad characters to root against. It is a well crafted story with a well written script that has been turned into an entertaining film.

Secondly, the humor, though gratuitous and gross, is at the same time clever and effective. The filmmakers did a fantastic job of using subtext in order to create a sort of double entendre where the hillbillies are saying something that they feel is either helpful to the college kids, or otherwise innocuous, but the college kids interpret it as dangerous and evil. This miscommunication helps to create scenarios that have great potential for humor, and the filmmakers took great advantage of that humor.

But most of all, the filmmakers did a great job of building the characters and their relationships so that the principle characters had satisfying character arcs and there was an equally satisfying story arc. Tucker goes from being shy and introverted to being a confident and clean cut person. And Ali goes from being judgmental and condescending to open minded. All of this happens within the framework of an entertaining and funny story that is one of the most original ideas I’ve seen in a long time.

This is a dark comedy, and one that is well worth seeing in the unlikely event that it comes to a theater near you. Or you can look for it on DVD or Netflix when it ends up on those media.