Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Tucker and Dale are two affable West Virginian buddies heading out to fix up a rundown cabin Tucker has just bought — his dream vacation home. At a gas station, their awkward attempt to say hello to a group of college students goes badly, leaving the students convinced they've encountered dangerous hillbillies.

When one of the college girls, Allison, falls into a lake at night and nearly drowns, Tucker and Dale fish her out and bring her aboard their boat to recover. Her friends, watching from shore, see two men pulling a screaming girl into the dark and conclude she's been abducted. What follows is a sustained, magnificently choreographed catastrophe of misunderstanding: the students attack the cabin to "rescue" Allison, and die in a string of accidental, increasingly elaborate ways — one runs face-first into a tree, another dives into a woodchipper trying to tackle Tucker, a third impales himself on a fence post. Tucker and Dale are baffled, then terrified, assuming they are under siege.

Meanwhile, Dale and Allison — who has been at the cabin the whole time, awake and treated kindly — begin to genuinely connect. As the student body count rises, one member of the group, Chad, grows increasingly unhinged. His motivations run deeper than fear: his mother was assaulted by a local man years ago and Chad — the product of that encounter — has channeled a lifetime of denial into a violent fixation on hillbilly killers. He begins murdering his own friends to maintain the narrative, takes Allison hostage, and tries to burn Tucker and Dale alive.

Dale, who has spent the entire film convinced he's not good enough for anyone, finds his nerve. He rescues Allison, defeats Chad, and the film ends with the two of them together — Tucker alive and mildly exasperated, the cabin a crime scene, and a genuinely sweet romance having emerged from the wreckage of a very bad weekend.