Movie review: Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End

More than three years later I got myself a Russian translation of a book with a very strange title "What the Hell Did I Just Read", a sequel to "John Dies at the End" and "This Book Is Full of Spiders" by David Wong and saw in it a wonderful occasion to remember the film adaptation of his debut novel, which was made by the legendary director Don Coscarelli, who earned a cult status thanks to the first four films of the "Phantasm" series.

Based on the book, the film saw the light of day in 2012, did well at sci-fi film festivals and gained cult movie status thanks to Wong's new novels.

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The main characters of the film, David and John, are idle friends from a small American town. The first one likes to lie on the couch, play consoles for hours, read comic books, and just "go with the flow. The second sings in a local punk band, likes to drink heavily and play pranks, is obsessed with conspiracy theories, but being by nature a "man of action" rarely bothers to think too much. "Shoot first, think later" is just about him.

At one of the parties after a concert, they meet Rastaman Marley, who gives them a new drug called "mind-expanding" called "soy sauce", but no one warned them that its side effect would be the ability to see monsters that have come into our world from countless parallel dimensions.

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Wong is an absolutely incredible author and in terms of originality of plot moves and inventiveness of narration he wants to be called Lovecraft for millennials.

He easily makes scary funny, funny - scary, not afraid to turn upside down the clichés of science fiction or play "classic horror", so that "John Dies at the End" is equally close to the humor of "Ash vs Evil Dead" and the multi-layered "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" in which anything could have happened.

And this is where it gets even more interesting - despite the fact that Coscarelli is already over 60 he somehow miraculously manages to convey this teenage hooliganism and the author's disregard for conventional rules. Frozen sausage monsters, hot dog talk instead of cell phone, tons of conspiracy and, of course, brains blown out with a shotgun - there is more than enough of that in the film and it looks, despite the obviously modest budget, very worthy.

Another big plus for me was the participation of Paul Giamatti and Doug Jones in the film. Giamatti, as always, did a good job as a journalist trying to make sense of what's going on, and Jones very rarely appears without makeup and it's a great opportunity to see the man who played most of the monsters in Guillermo del Toro's films. The ghosts in "Crimson Peak", the river monster in "The Shape of Water", Amphibian Abe and the monsters in the "Hellboy" dilation are just a small part of his track record, and even though his role in John is very small it is very nice to once again shudder at his fantastic plastique.

All this combined with very nice acting of the main characters who organically fit in with the geeky losers, gave a great result and if you are not indifferent to good and pretty funny sci-fi horrors and missed this funny movie, you should definitely fill that annoying gap.

8 out of 10


@NoiseCash | based on my Russian-language review | @Twitter



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