It’s getting to the point where people are making more postmodern meta-commentaries on the horror genre than they are making actual horror films. But that’s not a complaint. The whole reason I love the genre is because of the opportunities it allows for smart-asses to mess around with it. Which explains why I loved Tucker & Dale vs. Evil as much as I did. When it ended, I knew that it suffered from playing the same note over and over again, but I loved that note far too much to give anything resembling a fuck.

It helps that the film takes on the one horror cliché I truly, truly, truly hate with all of my heart: asshole victims. For a horror film to be frightening, a filmmaker must provoke empathy, not disgust. Make us care about your characters and we’ll tense up whenever they’re threatened. Make us loathe them and we’ll happily cheer on the maniac who’s supposed to scare us. Problem is doing the former is a lot harder than the latter, so most filmmakers don’t even bother to try.

Tucker & Dale takes on this cliché by turning the frat-asshole douche-cunts horror movies typically expect us to care about and making them the villains. Our heroes are the titular friendly buddies, whose lack of style and social pretensions could be confused from a distance as something out of Deliverance. Both are in the woods to work on Tucker’s fixer-upper of a vacation home, but when they fish an unconscious coed (Katrina Bowden of TV’s 30 Rock) out of the river, her idiot friends assume they’re kidnapping her, and accidentally kill themselves in various gruesome ways trying to “rescue” her.

From the beginning, it’s easy to see where the film is going and it never deviates from that path, but that doesn’t stop it from being a really fun time. Most of this is due to the wonderful performances by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine as the title characters. Both bring a sweetness and innocence to their roles that make them every bit as sympathetic as a horror movie victim should be. —Allan Mott

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Some filmmakers find their creative niche early and stick with it to the end. Take Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, who catapulted to Hollywood fame as the screenwriter behind one of Clint Eastwood’s biggest hits, Every Which Way but Loose (or, as it’s better known, the one with the fucking orangutan.

Unfortunately, Kronsberg was screwed out of the sequel, Any Which Way You Can (aka the other one with the fucking orangutan), so he decided to get even by writing and directing a movie that upped the ape ante to the power of three. In place of one of the world’s biggest movie stars, he cast the dumb boxer guy from TV’s Taxi and teamed him up with the short rude guy from — and this seems like it probably wasn’t a coincidence — TV’s Taxi.

In Going Ape!, Tony Danza plays a ne’er-do-well con man left in charge of a trio of redheaded primates after his circus-owning father passes away. If he can successfully tend to them for three years, he stands to inherent a $5 million fortune; if not, he’s shit out of luck. Helping out is Danny DeVito, his father’s Italian (?) assistant, and Stacey Nelkin, his super-cute, super-stacked girlfriend who breaks up with him at least 10 times in the course of the picture. Also along for the ride is Jessica Walter as Nelkin’s MILF-y mom, who’s mostly there to rile up DeVito and be robbed of her dignity.

Most of the nominal plot is spent on incompetent attempts by various interested parties to harm the apes, climaxing in a hospital chase sequence. A scene involving an attractive female cadaver seems completely out of place in a movie that should have been aimed at the youngest of children, but is too simultaneously adult and juvenile to appeal to anyone. Going Ape! flopped so badly, Danza had to wait eight years before headlining another terrible feature (She’s Out of Control), but he fared better than Kronsberg, who never earned another IMDb credit. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.