Available on DVD: “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil”

The impalement is a nice touch. The death by wood chipper, pretty sweet. But the best bit of comedy in the ridiculously gory Tucker and Dale vs. Evil eviscerates the field of psychology with no bloodshed at all.

Eli Craig, directing his first feature (from a script he wrote with Morgan Jurgenson), has put together a droll sendup of the killer-in-the-swamp genre that gets funnier as it rolls along. If you are one of the few who saw the dreadful Creature, don’t be alarmed that this film starts out identically: preppy-looking young people driving around the swampy South pull into a tattered store where they encounter creepy locals, then inexplicably decide to explore the woods.

Two of those creepy locals are Tucker (Alan Tudyk, currently trapped in the lame new sitcom Suburgatory) and Dale (Tyler Labine), who are harmless despite their appearance. (Tudyk and Labine mesh perfectly.) When the young visitors run into them again in the woods, they assume the worst, and through a series of accidents and misunderstandings, the worst comes to pass. Only Allison (Katrina Bowden), a psychology student, figures out that Tucker and Dale are pussycats, but her crisis-intervention techniques need work.