John Dies at the End

Had much fun with this! 7.5!

If you want to have a good time and when you are 'open' for something different, you will like it.

It's a nice genre mix of comedy, horror, splatter, fantasy and scifi!

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.

...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.

"John Dies at the End" is not a film for everyone. It's incredibly strange, practically impossible to describe and has no conventional plot elements. It's really like combining "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey", "Men in Black" an "Evil Dead" film and lots of LSD. It's incredibly strange and trippy...and something conventional film viewers probably won't enjoy. As for me, I enjoyed it once I stopped trying to understand it!

The story is a bizarro tale of Dave and his friend, John and their weird lives once they try a weird drug they dub 'soy sauce'. Once it's in their systems, they get caught up in a weird battle between parallel worlds and none of it makes the least bit of sense. What follows is one weird CGI explosion after another--and I do recommend you try it if you have a high capacity for the strange. I would try to say more...but this film truly defies description though it does look like the filmmakers possibly intended to make sequels.

This movie has one good idea; a drug that lets you see beyond reality. Sadly though, that's it. The rest of the movie is just a badly told mess with no real ideas and a somewhat irritating cheap look about it. I have to be honest I really couldn't be bothered to watch it to the end. It has none of the consistency or style of a movie like for example "from beyond" which tells a similar story but makes it watchable. There's a couple of mildly amusing bits, but they are right at the start and from there on the film goes nowhere.

It's a shame because it did initially look interesting. Although billed as a comedy there are very few attempts to make you laugh. Depressingly the first review on IMDb I saw for it predictably described it as genius.