Tucker and Dale vs Evil
The clever joke at the heart of the witty horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs Evil is that college kids who go camping in the backwoods have seen so many movies about degenerate, inbred killer hillbillies they’re terrified even of basically sweet-natured, if ill-groomed folks like the eponymous duo played by Tyler Lebine and Alan Tudyk.
In truth, the American cinema hasn’t been especially enlightened in its depiction of the rural poor of the Appalachians and other mountainous backwoods regions, but it hasn’t presented quite as overwhelmingly negative a vision as you might think.
Here’s a run-down of the Top Ten Hillbilly Films, with notes on the most influential clichés about dungaree-wearing, unshaven, oversexed, moonshine-brewing, inbred, mostly psychopathic, undereducated, unkempt down-home/up-country folks.
Tobacco Road (1941)
Many of the commonplace stereotypes of hillbilly life - the falling-down shacks, dungaree overalls with only one strap, character names like ‘Jeeter’ and ‘Ellie May’, inbreeding, feckless criminal squalour - date back to Erskine Caldwell’s novel, which enjoyed its biggest success as a long-running Broadway play before John Ford filmed it as his follow-up to The Grapes of Wrath in exploring the underside of Depression America.
Very much a filmed play, it stars Charley Grapewin as shiftless hillbilly patriarch Jeeter Lester and Gene Tierney as his unfeasably gorgeous daughter Ellie May. The incest angle, a hot topic in the play, is nearly eliminated.
Ma and Pa Kettle (1949)
In The Egg and I (1947), a comedy about a city couple who inherit a farm, leads Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray were upstaged by the dry comic timing of Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as local characters.
Main and Kilbride reprised their roles in this spin-off, which inaugurated a series of lowbrow comedies from Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950) through Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955) and The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956) to The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm (1957). On the whole, they were funnier than Francis the Talking Mule. Just.
Thunder Road (1958)
‘Let me tell the story, I can tell it all,’ sings star-producer Robert Mitchum in the insanely catchy theme tune, ‘about the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol ’ This is the first and best of a string of macho films (see Burt Reynolds in White Lightning and David Carradine in Thunder and Lightning) about fast-driving hillbillies beating the feds in twisty mountain road car chases to get the moonshine liquour from backwoods stills to market.
Lazy-lidded Mitchum, in one of his great roles, is the demon behind the wheel. The ending is inevitable, ‘moonshine, moonshine, to quench the Devil’s thirst - the law they swore they’d get him, but the Devil got him first.’
Li’l Abner (1959)
Al Capp’s newspaper strip about strapping, good-natured backwoods idiot Li’l Abner and the many denizens of his home town of Dogpatch became a Broadway musical (the hit number was ‘Jubilation T. Cornpone’, sung here by Stubby Kaye) and then this cartoonish-looking, interesting-but-not-entirely-successful film.
The plot involves the US government deciding to have an A-bomb test in Dogpatch because it’s the most useless town in the country, and an array of bizarre local characters who get mixed up in things.
With Julie Newmar (later Catwoman) as Stupefyin’ Jones, the hillbilly seductress whose mere presence mesmerises men, and Leslie Parrish as Daisy Mae who is frustrated that Abner (Peter Palmer) won’t notice her because at sevnteen she’s getting past marrying age in these parts.
Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967)
This is a sequel to Las Vegas Hillbillys, but earns the spot on this list for its great title alone. How come no one has remade this? Ferlin Husky and Joi Lansing, country stars with better names than the characters they play (Woody Wetherby and Boots Malone), are en route to Nashville for a jamboree when they get waylaid in a house with super-spies, a gorilla and spooks John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr and Basil Rathbone.
One of a string of films - which boast titles like Hootenanay Hayride - actually aimed at hillbilly audiences, showcasing jug-band music and folksy jokes, this is a rare movie about happy, unthreatening, clean-looking mountain types who just want to play music and have a good time without making anyone squeal like a pig.
Deliverance (1972)
This has probably done more than any other film to put off urban folks from visiting America’s genuinely beautiful backwoods.
At least three of the incidental characters remain the most iconic hillbillies in modern cinema: the withered-face gas station boy (Billy Redden) who plays ‘Duellin’ Banjos’ with extraordinary skill (the picking is actually by Michael Addiss) in a face-off with the guitar-toting doomed townie (Ronny Cox); and the brutal, lecherous Mountain Men (Bill McKinney, Herbert ‘Cowboy’ Coward) who rape Ned Beatty.
It’s now impossible for anyone to encounter a hillbilly in a film without either making a plunking banjo sound or a ‘squeal like a pig’ joke.
The Last American Hero (1973)
Based on a series of magazine articles by Tom Wolfe, this is an interesting true-life drama about Elroy ‘Junior’ Jackson (a slightly too-cleancut Jeff Bridges), who started out in life by zooming along Thunder Road dodging the ‘Revenuers’ to shift moonshine but redirected himself by getting into demolition derby and then became an early star in America’s most hillbilly-friendly sporting event, the NASCAR car racing circuit.
With a good ole boy cast including a non-squealing Ned Beatty, Gary Busey and ace biker-look dude William Smith.
Next of Kin (1989)
Though there are plenty of films about city folks in trouble in the sticks, there are few which reverse the situation. This is a thriller about two contrasting hillbilly brothers in Chicago - a citified by-the-book cop (Patrick Swayze) and a more determinedly old-school take-the-law-in-his-hands vigilante (Liam Neeson) - who set out to bring in the mafia killers responsible for the death of a third sibling.
The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)
The 1962 TV series made something of a cult of the comedy hillbillies who strike it rich when oil is found on their land (‘black gold, Texas tea’) and move to Los Angeles’ exclusive Beverly Hills (‘swimming pools, movie stars).
The Clampetts’ plain good nature shows up the city slickers next door as crass snobs, even if they are ignorant of the finer points of life, in a rare case of a positive hillbilly stereotype.
The 1993 film, directed by Penelophe Spheeris, ideally casts redneck comedy icon Jim Varney (of the ‘Ernest’ films) in Buddy Ebsen’s old role as Jed Clampett (Ebson appears in his other old role, as geriatric PI Barnaby Jones) - but it’s among the poorest bigscreen films based on cult TV series.
Winter’s Bone (2010)
A realistic, clear-eyed depiction of contemporary mountain life in a backwoods America seemingly abandoned by society, where methamphetimine cooking has replaced moonshine-brewing as an illicit source of income and clannish insularity imposes rigid rules of conduct - especially on womenfolk - which make the mafia look like a liberal employer.
Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), a teenager who has had to become the guardian of her siblings because of her parents’ uselessness, is forced to defy convention and find out what happened to her missing father. This neither demonises nor sentimentalises the rural poor, but offers a genuinely admirable hillbilly heroine.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil is sure to put two more red necks in to the cinematic halls of fame when the DVD and Blu-ray is released on Monday 26 September.
Kim Newman
The clever joke at the heart of the witty horror comedy Tucker and Dale vs Evil is that college kids who go camping in the backwoods have seen so many movies about degenerate, inbred killer hillbillies they’re terrified even of basically sweet-natured, if ill-groomed folks like the eponymous duo played by Tyler Lebine and Alan Tudyk.
In truth, the American cinema hasn’t been especially enlightened in its depiction of the rural poor of the Appalachians and other mountainous backwoods regions, but it hasn’t presented quite as overwhelmingly negative a vision as you might think.
Here’s a run-down of the Top Ten Hillbilly Films, with notes on the most influential clichés about dungaree-wearing, unshaven, oversexed, moonshine-brewing, inbred, mostly psychopathic, undereducated, unkempt down-home/up-country folks.
Tobacco Road (1941)
Many of the commonplace stereotypes of hillbilly life - the falling-down shacks, dungaree overalls with only one strap, character names like ‘Jeeter’ and ‘Ellie May’, inbreeding, feckless criminal squalour - date back to Erskine Caldwell’s novel, which enjoyed its biggest success as a long-running Broadway play before John Ford filmed it as his follow-up to The Grapes of Wrath in exploring the underside of Depression America.
Very much a filmed play, it stars Charley Grapewin as shiftless hillbilly patriarch Jeeter Lester and Gene Tierney as his unfeasably gorgeous daughter Ellie May. The incest angle, a hot topic in the play, is nearly eliminated.
Ma and Pa Kettle (1949)
In The Egg and I (1947), a comedy about a city couple who inherit a farm, leads Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray were upstaged by the dry comic timing of Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as local characters.
Main and Kilbride reprised their roles in this spin-off, which inaugurated a series of lowbrow comedies from Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950) through Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955) and The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956) to The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm (1957). On the whole, they were funnier than Francis the Talking Mule. Just.
Thunder Road (1958)
‘Let me tell the story, I can tell it all,’ sings star-producer Robert Mitchum in the insanely catchy theme tune, ‘about the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol ’ This is the first and best of a string of macho films (see Burt Reynolds in White Lightning and David Carradine in Thunder and Lightning) about fast-driving hillbillies beating the feds in twisty mountain road car chases to get the moonshine liquour from backwoods stills to market.
Lazy-lidded Mitchum, in one of his great roles, is the demon behind the wheel. The ending is inevitable, ‘moonshine, moonshine, to quench the Devil’s thirst - the law they swore they’d get him, but the Devil got him first.’
Li’l Abner (1959)
Al Capp’s newspaper strip about strapping, good-natured backwoods idiot Li’l Abner and the many denizens of his home town of Dogpatch became a Broadway musical (the hit number was ‘Jubilation T. Cornpone’, sung here by Stubby Kaye) and then this cartoonish-looking, interesting-but-not-entirely-successful film.
The plot involves the US government deciding to have an A-bomb test in Dogpatch because it’s the most useless town in the country, and an array of bizarre local characters who get mixed up in things.
With Julie Newmar (later Catwoman) as Stupefyin’ Jones, the hillbilly seductress whose mere presence mesmerises men, and Leslie Parrish as Daisy Mae who is frustrated that Abner (Peter Palmer) won’t notice her because at sevnteen she’s getting past marrying age in these parts.
Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967)
This is a sequel to Las Vegas Hillbillys, but earns the spot on this list for its great title alone. How come no one has remade this? Ferlin Husky and Joi Lansing, country stars with better names than the characters they play (Woody Wetherby and Boots Malone), are en route to Nashville for a jamboree when they get waylaid in a house with super-spies, a gorilla and spooks John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr and Basil Rathbone.