[JOHN DIES AT
THE END screens Friday February 15th and Saturday February 16th
at midnight at the Capitol Theatre.]
Review by Bob
Ignizio
JOHN DIES AT THE END
is about a couple of slacker friends – John (Rob Mayes) and Dave
(Chase Williamson) – who take a weird new street drug called “soy
sauce” that gives them various supernatural abilities. As John
explains to reporter Arnie (Paul Giamatti) via flashback,
they then reluctantly used these new powers to fight hideous
extradimensional abominations like a monster made out of meat, which
isn't even the weirdest thing in the movie. Eventually they team up with a one armed girl named Amy (Fabianne Therese), her dog, and occult superstar Marconi (Clancy Brown) to face a threat that endangers the whole world. Not surprisingly Arnie is a bit skeptical, as are we, but Dave promises he has proof.
No
two ways about it, JOHN DIES AT THE END
is a pretty weird movie. Not that it should come as any surprise,
seeing as it's based on a pretty weird book and directed by Don
Coscarelli, the man responsible for the PHANTASM
series, THE BEASTMASTER,
and BUBBA HO-TOP. On
Coscarelli's own scale, I'd put this somewhere in between PHANTASM
and BUBBA. It has
some of the surrealism and anything goes nuttiness of the former, but
also the whole unlikely hero thing that BUBBA
had going on. There are also echoes of such eighties flicks as THE
HIDDEN and NIGHT OF
THE CREEPS (not to mention a touch of stuff like THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI, REPO MAN, and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA). The film goes for
more laughs than scares, but still takes its plot seriously enough to
create an appropriate level of tension and suspense. The fact that
the actors all play it straight helps a lot, too.
Like
all of Coscarelli's films, rough edges occasionally show. Nothing
outright shoddy, just not the sort of super slick special effects and
production values you'd expect from a major Hollywood production. As
far as low budget independent fare goes, though, it's about as good as it
gets. Any shortcomings are more than made up for by the
originality and passion that oozes from every frame of this film. It's funny, clever, and disgusting in the sort of way that only indie horror films like RE-ANIMATOR, DEAD-ALIVE, EVIL DEAD 2, and of course Mr. Coscarelli's own past body of work can be. If a big studio had made this, it might have looked slicker, but it wouldn't have been have been half as fun and original. 3 out of 4 stars.
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