John Dies at the End

I absolutely love this insane and underrated blend of slacker comedy, sci-fi, fantasy and horror. Okay, some of the special effects leave a lot to be desired (as you'd expect when you consider the film's high ambitions and low budget) but that doesn't take anything away from everything it does right. The plot just gets crazier as the street drug known as "Soy Sauce", which grants it's users supernatural, inter-dimensional powers, becomes popular and threatens an apocalypse that only two slackers named Dave and John can prevent, a responsibility they are woefully unprepared for. If you zone out for two seconds you'll forget what genre you were watching, as it switches from being goofy fun to genuinely creepy at it's own leisure. Chase Williamson's deadpan and cynical performance as Dave offers a hilarious perspective to tell the story from and his chemistry with best friend John is so much fun to watch. A few years ago I went through a phase where I would put this film on every time I got stoned and I just found it funnier every time (catching jokes and plot points I'd missed from hazy viewings prior). It also offers a cool splattering of existential observations for you to wrap your head around.

John Dies at the End's unrelenting commitment to absurd humour and all things random lends itself perfectly for a stoned viewing. This used to be my favourite film to watch stoned and writing this has gotten me so excited to rewatch it for the first time in years tonight. It's trashy but it's fun.

This film reminded me a lot of Naked Lunch crossed with Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure in some ways (if you've seen all three of these movies you'll know what I mean). You have a guy (Dave) and his friend (John) who end up stumbling across a drug that opens their minds (both figuratively and literally) to another world. There is some good humor here and some of the scenes make you laugh (the meat man being one). The story is obviously over the top, but that is what makes this film fun to watch. You have to go in to this movie with an open mind (being under the influence might help to) and don't take it too seriously, that being said I can see some people doing just that and they won't get it. It has elements of horror, good old fashioned special effects - some new also, some comedy, and the obligatory nude scene. As I said, some people won't like this movie, but I enjoyed it. Fun to watch, so for that and the reasons I gave earlier, I give this a 7 out of 10.

I'm not even sure where to start with a movie like JOHN DIES AT THE END. It's one of those movies that just seems destined from the start to be a cult classic, but I'm not so sure. I love a good WTF movie that I can share with friends over a few beers, but a good WTF movie does more than baffle the audience with the bizarre. A good WTF film will have an awesome story (e.g. cyberpunk Nazis on the moon = IRON SKY) and an engaging hero/protagonist (e.g. Rutger Hauer in HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN). Keep in mind, my examples are just movies that I personally enjoy in the WTF genre but the same principles still stand. I can't really agree that JOHN DIES AT THE END has either (much less both) of these qualities. I am a huge fan of Cracked.com and I've been following the site since I first stumbled across it while searching for a time-waster while I worked tech support. Their content is most often hilarious and generally a bit informative too. I'm totally down with supporting their writers in whatever endeavors they pursue if it means more of their excellent product. JOHN DIES AT THE END (written by senior Cracked editor David Wong) is on my shortlist of novels I'm planning on buying from Amazon, but I was excited to find out that a movie would be released in the meantime and that it would be directed by Don Coscarelli. BUBBA HO-TEP is another great WTF film, so naturally I was expecting great things with the movie. The ultimate reality: it falls short of being the movie I wanted, but it has inspired me to move a little faster on picking up the novel.

To start, and you'll probably hear this from anyone who's seen the movie but not read the novel, JOHN DIES AT THE END doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It feels like there's a plot in there…somewhere. I just can't find it. I've uncovered bits of it and pieced it all together but there are still a lot of holes. I've pretty much given up on figuring out the plot in its entirety until I read the book. For now, I only know what I've seen in the movie. David Wong (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes) are a couple of stoned losers who encounter a new drug known on the street as 'soy sauce.' Soy sauce has the ability to give its user supernatural abilities that…I don't quite understand. Communicating with the dead…and the future…and other dimensions, I think. And inexplicable knowledge. Anyway, David and John discover an evil plot involving body-snatching white bugs/fuzz and plans of an entity of pure evil from an alternate universe to dominate our world. See what I mean? I'm not even sure. And everything I've read tells me it's explained 100 times better in the novel, so I haven't given up hope. But, as a movie, it's lacking. Honestly, my interest waned around the time David was kidnapped by an annoying ghetto white kid (Jonny Weston) and the detective investigating the weird goings-on (Glynn Turman) went totally mental.

And that's the big problem here: weirdness without any sort of context becomes dull real fast. For the first 45 minutes of the movie or so, I was loving it. The meat monster, the ominous Jamaican, the messed-up/dark sense of humor to the whole thing…it was great. But once the "story" kicked into gear, I lost it. The best way to describe JOHN DIES AT THE END is this: it feels like a 100-minute trailer for a really awesome six-hour movie. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here and the whole movie feels like it's on the verge of greatness but it never pays off. There's a lot of cool stuff that's introduced or mentioned and never fully explored. What was the deal with Roger North (Doug Jones)? And what about the alien slug with teeth that appeared three times in the movie? Was it a tool of good or evil? How exactly did Korrok's plan (Korrok being the ultimate evil entity from an alternate universe) involve the body-snatching bugs? If Dr. Marconi (Clancy Brown) was so awesome, why wasn't the movie about HIM saving the world? Seriously. Marconi was probably the coolest character in the whole movie and he's the most wasted. Brown gets higher billing than Paul Giamatti in the movie but he's only in it for about 5 minutes. What's the point of his character? He's stone-cold awesome in the few instances we see him in action, but we send David and John to help save the world? Where did the soy sauce come from? Is it a creation of Korrok? Did it have anything to do with the white bug swarms or not, because I'm getting mixed signals.

More questions than answers with the plot, but at least some of the humor works well. Chase Williamson is pretty decent as David Wong and Rob Hayes did a great job, but I think a lot of fans of Cracked might agree that this movie would've been exponentially funnier if Daniel O'Brien and Michael Swaim had been cast in the lead roles. People who aren't followers of Cracked won't know who those two are, but it couldn't have hurt the movie's success seeing as how the release was so low-key to begin with. JOHN DIES AT THE END is a mildly entertaining distraction that will frustrate anyone in the market for a solid story but there are some good laughs to be had. If anything, I can say it's got me that much more interested in reading the book.

...and it was. I also expected it to be funny, and it was that too. I had not read the book previously and knew nearly nothing about the story, but if you've seen the trailer, that is pretty much adequate preparation for the strangeness you subject yourself to as you watch this movie.

Several scenes are just outright setups for jokes, and if this film was just set em up, knock em down - it would not be worth an 8. What makes this movie better than that is that it is, at it's core - psychotic in the best way possible. You never know if what you are seeing is real or not, and just when you think you couldn't see or handle anything weirder, something hilarious happens to shift gears.

Like many independent movies, this one has a interesting idea at its base and some fairly decent acting but runs out of steam far too early. The end is almost Austin Powers like (i.e. silly). The technical quality fairly good but it is never able to get over the weak story line in the second part of the movie. I imagine Paul Giamatti's involvement was to lend a bit of credibility to the project. However, it is fairly clear that his scenes were shot in a single day (all are in the same Chinese restaurant), so the result is actually the reverse since the commercial motive of the casting is so evident. To sum up, they had me interested at the start and hopeful in the middle but bored and disappointed at the end.