I come to bury \u201cJohn Dies at the End,\u201d not to praise it. Of course, after burying it I\u2019ll dig it up again, replace its head with a frozen turkey and send it, staggering and undead, to batter down your door in the middle of the night with a bloody shovel. So lend me your ears, detached from your head.<\/p>\n
One thing that Paul Giamatti said in our conversation about Don Coscarelli\u2019s crazily inventive horror movie (adapted from a similarly nutso novel by David Wong), which Giamatti appears in and helped produce, is that the film\u2019s mode is \u201cexcess.\u201d That\u2019s both true and not true. Coscarelli throws us into the middle of a bewildering story about two small-town exorcists who are battling extra-dimensional invaders while addicted to a mysterious street drug called \u201csoy sauce\u201d that alters time, space and human perception and seems to be a parasitical organism with its own agenda. And even before that, the movie begins with a gruesome and hilarious philosophical puzzler, a kind of shaggy-dog anecdote that has nothing to do with the so-called story. (For the record, my answer to the vengeful zombie\u2019s unanswerable Zen-koan question is yes.)<\/p>\n
But this is all happening within what feels like the straight-to-video universe of a low-budget zombie flick, complete with special effects done on the cheap \u2013 including the already legendary Meat Monster, comprising the contents of a freezer case, assembled into a quasi-bipedal \u201cmanifestation\u201d \u2014 glib bromantic banter between the 20-something male leads and an array of comic stereotypes in the supporting roles. Those include Giamatti as a pudgy, cynical journalist who isn\u2019t what he seems to be and Clancy Brown as an unctuous TV mystic who may or may not be the plaything of intergalactic evil, along with a Jamaican psychic-dealer type named \u201cRobert Marley,\u201d a laconic black detective straight from the Morgan Freeman playbook, a street-talking white kid tasked with opening the gateway to other dimensions and a heroic dog named Bark Lee.<\/p>\n
In other words, \u201cJohn Dies at the End\u201d deliberately tries to blur the distinctions between categories that we pretend don\u2019t exist anymore, but that still divide popular entertainment into warring camps. Is this an \u201cindie\u201d film with a deliberately messed-up chronology and an ambitious narrative you\u2019ll appreciate even more the second time through? Yes. Is this a deliberately trashy horror-comedy with a few decent jolts and several big laughs, best viewed with a gang of friends and a consciousness-altering agent of your choosing, parasitical or not? That too.<\/p>\n
The key thing here is that I\u2019m not telling you to think this movie is any good if you don\u2019t think this kind of movie is any good. Like Coscarelli\u2019s peculiar \u201cPhantasm\u201d horror franchise, an incomprehensible fairy tale about an interdimensional grave robber and slave trader armed with flying metal spheres full of spinning razor blades, which stretched across four films and 20 years without ever becoming massively popular, \u201cJohn Dies at the End\u201d has a self-limiting audience. A self-limiting audience of geeks; let\u2019s just put that out there.<\/p>\n
Coscarelli told me he thinks of his movies as \u201cintelligence tests,\u201d which is a sure way to endear himself to people who think they\u2019re junk, isn\u2019t it? If you liked \u201cDonnie Darko\u201d and David Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cNaked Lunch\u201d; if you enjoyed \u201cScott Pilgrim vs. the World\u201d and Michael Haneke\u2019s early films \u2013 and the underappreciated third film of George A. Romero\u2019s zombie trilogy, and Zack Snyder\u2019s \u201cSucker Punch\u201d \u2013 well, then I think you\u2019re good with \u201cJohn Dies at the End.\u201d (You might have to admit that you kind of liked Guy Ritchie\u2019s idiotic work of Madonna-informed mysticism, \u201cRevolver,\u201d and you certainly have to be excited about Giamatti\u2019s upcoming role in Ari Folman\u2019s \u201cThe Congress,\u201d adapted from a novel by Polish sci-fi cult hero Stanislaw Lem.) Like I say, self-limiting.<\/p>\n
I guess both Wong\u2019s book and Coscarelli\u2019s movie feature the ultimate spoiler title. Except that John (Rob Mayes), the ladykilling charmer half of the ghost-busting central duo, dies closer to the middle than the end \u2013 it\u2019s just that cellphone calls he made while alive keep reaching his buddy Dave (Chase Williamson) long afterward, sometimes via bratwursts and other non-electronic objects. Oh, crap \u2013 I wasn\u2019t supposed to say that, was I? Well, don\u2019t worry, because the basic causality of the time-space continuum is very much in question when you\u2019re on soy sauce; the distinction between past and future gets blurry and death doesn\u2019t seem to be permanent. As John murmurs dolefully to Dave, not long before his demise, \u201cI\u2019m so sorry about all the things that will happen! All the people who are gonna \u2026 explode!\u201d<\/p>\n
Quite a few people explode, and the detached, wisecracking Dave can\u2019t do much about it. (Like the author and narrator of the novel, Williamson\u2019s character is named David Wong, but is not Asian. Wong is actually the long-running pseudonym of Jason Pargin, an editor at Cracked.com and noted Internet humorist.) Coscarelli has embraced the impossible task of turning Wong\u2019s self-conscious narrative voice, and the book\u2019s hallucinatory flow of incoherent images and disconnected adventures, into something approximating a 100-minute movie with characters and a story.<\/p>\n
Something is most certainly lost in this translation \u2013 the book, while wildly uneven, is also heavily literary and self-referential, resembling in its best moments an attention-deficit mashup of Stephen King and Flann O\u2019Brien. Unquestionably, the movie gets a bit less interesting and fun as it behaves more like a normal, if ridonk-ulous, science-fiction narrative, in which our heroes must go through the dimensional portal in the Mall of the Dead and confront the Alien Whatsit who yearns to devour our planet. Because who really cares about that at this point? We\u2019re all screwed anyway.<\/p>\n
But plenty is gained too, including what may be the most freewheeling and imaginative film of Coscarelli\u2019s checkered career, loaded with tripped-out mood and nicely balanced between humor, horror and an underlay of genuine sweetness. Coscarelli has evidently never had the right blend of craftsmanship and salesmanship to translate his particular rarefied B-movie aesthetic into a mass phenomenon \u2014 but he has also never failed to treat his modestly sized and admittedly strange audience with respect, and has always operated on the assumption that people who enjoy gruesome and outrageous scenarios are also open to adventurous storytelling. With the horror genre showing more signs of life than at any time in the last 20 years or more, and guys that Coscarelli clearly influenced, like Joss Whedon and Zack Snyder, near the top of Hollywood\u2019s A-list, \u201cJohn Dies at the End\u201d suggests that Don\u2019s got plenty of life in him yet.<\/p>\n
from http:\/\/www.salon.com\/