With a few
notable exceptions, most mainstream horror films are predictable as the
cinematic landscape is littered with unimaginative remakes like Evil Dead (2013) and Carrie (2013) or a seemingly endless
assembly line of sequels to lucrative franchises like Paranormal Activity. As always, it’s up to independent filmmakers
like Don Coscarelli to come up with unique and original horror films. His claim
to fame comes from the much beloved Phantasm
series of films, but in recent years his output has slowed down considerably
with his last effort being Bubba Ho-Tep
in 2002. So, it is great to see him resurface in 2012 with John Dies at the End, an adaptation of David Wong’s gonzo cult novel of the same name. The end result resembles a souped-up episode of Supernatural as if written in the spirit
of esoteric hybrid genre films like The
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).
The film
begins with our protagonist David Wong (Chase Williamson) extolling the merits
of replacing an axe and then the blade itself because, hey, that can happen
when you’re trying to dispatch a zombie skinhead with a swastika tattoo on his
tongue and who won’t stay dead even when his head has been chopped off. This is
Dave’s dilemma. He’s a twentysomething that once saw a man’s kidney grow
tentacles and free itself from the body, but, y’know, that’s another story.
Dave meets a
reporter by the name of Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) and tells him a story
about a crazy adventure he and his friend John Cheese (Rob Mayes) went on at
three in the morning. They investigate a young woman’s claims that her
boyfriend, who’s been dead for several months, is harassing her. So, Dave and
John go over to her house not expecting much only to discover a freezer in the
basement that’s full of meat, which proceeds to assemble itself into a large
meat monster looking for its nemesis, one Dr. Albert Marconi (Clancy Brown), a
popular television infomercial psychic.
Dave and John
are amateur paranormal investigators who met a couple years out of high school.
Dave was a jaded skeptic who met a Jamaican man known as Robert Marley (Tai
Bennett) at a party. He was able to read Dave’s mind and this, understandably, rattles
Dave as Rob espouses the notion that he can see into the future. These arcane
insights into the universe come courtesy of a substance known as Soy Sauce, a
black liquid that allows one to perceive time in non-linear fashion as well as
alternate dimensions. Dave and John are eventually enlisted by Marconi to
prevent a sentient organic computer known as Korrok from spreading his brand of
evil across multiple dimensions.
Dave is the
audience surrogate, taking us through this crazy world where he can be talking
to John on the phone while his friend is dying in a nearby room (in a sly
parody of a similar scene in David Lynch’s Lost
Highway), or a man’s moustache can detach itself from its owner’s face and
flutter around the room like a bat. In other words, some pretty crazy shit.
Throughout it all, Dave tries to make sense of these other realities opened up
to him thanks to the Soy Sauce. Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes are well cast as
Dave and John, grounding the film with their engaging performances. Each one of
them brings a different energy with the former portraying Dave as a skeptic and
the latter instilling John with an infectious optimism. It is a lot of fun to
see them bouncing off eccentric characters played by the likes of Angus Scrimm,
Clancy Brown and Paul Giamatti.
John Dies at the End is chock full of clever and amusing
dialogue, like the police detective (Glynn Turman) that doesn’t believe in
other dimensions, but does believe in hell: “The grease trap of the universe …
It is not just some place down there. Oh no, it’s right here with us we just
can’t perceive it. It’s kinda like the country music radio station. It’s out
there in the air even if you don’t tune into it.” This is just a sample of the
kind of wild observations and theories that run wild throughout this film
making it more than just some instant cult film for stoners to mull over
between bong hits. For an indie film, John
Dies at the End looks as slick and polished as any studio effort.
Coscarelli’s years of experience makes this film look more expensive than it is
as he effortlessly shifts from comedy to horror to science fiction in a way
that is very entertaining.
John Dies at the End started as a webserial written by
Jason Pargin (under the pen name David Wong) that began appearing online in
2001. He described it as a “150,000-word novel for people who consider a
140-character tweet too much.” It was eventually edited into a manuscript and
published in paperback form in 2007. Filmmaker Don Coscarelli discovered the
book via Amazon.com’s “Amazon Recommends” function on their website. He read
Pargin’s book, loved it, tracked down the author and bought the film rights. One
of the things that drew Coscarelli to David Wong’s novel was that underneath
the comedy and horror was “some philosophical thoughts running throughout that
are quite captivating.” It tapped into his interest in multiple dimensions:
“When I read these ideas from great sci-fi authors about inter-dimensional
travel and then from the great scientists about multiple membrane universes
layered on top of one another, I just find it compelling … when I can work
those kinds of themes into a wacky horror film, all the better.”
Actor Paul
Giamatti was a fan of Coscarelli’s films starting with Phantasm (1979) back when his brother snuck him in to see it as a
kid. While in Prague filming The
Illusionist (2006), he met director Eli Roth who was there making Hostel (2005). They talked about
Giamatti filming a cameo, but it didn’t pan out and the actor told Roth how
much of a fan he was of Coscarelli and how he would like to work with him. Roth
knew Coscarelli and introduced the two men. They planned to work together on a
sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep. However, they
couldn’t get financing for it and moved on to John Dies at the End. Coscarelli and Giamatti approached several
major Hollywood studios for financing, but none of them understood the script
and so they realized that independent backing was the way to go. Due to the
film’s limited budget, Coscarelli cast two unknown actors as the leads. Both
Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes had never acted in a feature film before, which
was a bit of a risky gamble for Coscarelli, but he surrounded them with veteran
actors like Clancy Brown and Giamatti. Williamson was a student in the
University of Southern California’s drama department and on his first day of
filming he had to do eight pages of dialogue with Giamatti!
John Dies at
the End
received mixed reviews from mainstream critics. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote,
“It has the loose, goofy feel of a project that a bunch of college students (or
dropouts, in Dave’s case) might dream up during a long weekend of beer and bong
hits. And yet at the same time it looks like a real movie – artfully shot,
cleanly edited and very much in control of the laughs and scares that arise
from its insanely convoluted set of premises.” The Village Voice’s Nick Pinkerton wrote, “The loquacity and temporally
shuffled narrative is off-the-rack Tarantino; the bizarre mind-benders, ‘Lynchian’;
the horror-comic asides combining the mundane and the fantastic, ‘Raimi-esque’;
the grab bag borrowing of avant-garde techniques, straight up Natural Born Killers.” In his review for
the Los Angeles Times, Robert Abele
wrote, “Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter
gore, the surreal John Dies at the End
has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.”
Finally, Rolling Stone magazine gave
it two-and-a-half out of four stars and Peter Travers wrote, “Go for the freaky
fun of it, though a little soy sauce on the side sure wouldn’t hurt.”
John Dies at the End is one of those films that you either
dive in and go on the ride with, trusting that Coscarelli knows what he’s
doing, or resist and give up – it’s a cinematic litmus test for one’s ability
to deal with a lot of weirdness being thrown at you. It’s sink or swim time as
the film doesn’t wait for you try and catch up. He’s always had a kinship for
offbeat subject matter, be it a funeral home with a portal to another dimension
in Phantasm or Elvis Presley teaming
up with an elderly African American man who thinks he’s John F. Kennedy to stop
an evil monster in Bubba Ho-Tep. John Dies at the End certainly fits
comfortably in his wheelhouse as it refuses simple summarization, piling on one
bizarro encounter after another. There’s a wonderful unpredictable energy to
this film that is refreshing and makes all the soulless remakes and sequels
look safe and tired by comparison.
SOURCES
Collis,
Clark. “Paul Giamatti and Director Don Coscarelli Talk About Their Demented
Horror-Comedy.” Entertainment Weekly. January 22, 2013.
Gencarelli,
Mike. “Don Coscarelli Talks about John
Dies at the End and Bubba Ho-Tep
and Phantasm Sequels.” Media Mikes.
April 9, 2013.
Labrecque,
Jeff. “Sundance: Bubba Ho-Tep
Director Back with a Vengeance.” Entertainment Weekly. January 24, 2012.
McIntyre,
Gina. “John Dies at the End: Paul
Giamatti, Don Coscarelli on Cult Cinema.” Los Angeles Times. January 22,
2013.
Pace, Dave.
“Q+A: Don Coscarelli on John Dies and
Independent Filmmaking for 30+ Years.” Fangoria. April 11, 2013.
Walton,
Brian. “John Dies at the End’s Paul
Giamatti and Don Coscarelli.” Nerdist. January 15, 2013.
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