You’ve got to hand it to Don Coscarelli. After three decades in service of his scary movie franchise, Phantasm, he started the new millennium with the hilarious horror mash-up Bubba Ho-Tep. That film, featuring Evil Dead icon Bruce Campbell as an aging Elvis battling an ancient mummy became an instant cult classic. Now, nearly a decade later, he is back. No, not with the proposed sequel Bubba Nosferatu, but with a brazenly bizzaro world comedy called John Dies at the End. Based on a popular novel by Jason Pargin (under the pseudonym “David Wong”) and dealing with drugs, demons, and parallel dimensions, it serves as a solid reminder of why Coscarelli is so well loved among horror geeks. It also illustrates why his vision won’t be copping any mainstream acceptance anytime soon.

Alternative titles: Say Yer Prayers; The Manly Dentist
 
POSITIVES:

A praying mantis is so cool—and it’s the only insect that can turn its head on its neck, like you or me! (True fact).

Monster effects are generally okay, though fleeting.

At least there’s no little kid.

Bad movies are nothing new.  Surely they date as far back as cinema itself; as soon as you have more than one of anything, you run the risk of one being “better” than the other. 

And certainly early American film history is littered with some pretty pungent cinema stinkers—the hyperbolic Reefer Madness came out in 1938; the notorious flop I Take This Woman, with Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr, emerged in 1940; and the nadir of Bette Davis’s career, Beyond the Forest, was unleashed in 1949.

They say that funny men always want to play dramatic. They also argue that the serious actor always longs to be the buffoon. Stretching the sentiment out even further, leading men always long to break free of the handsome hunk mode and play down and dirty. Similarly, the heavy hopes for the day when they can look at a script and not see their name associated with the diabolical, the destructive, and the dead. So in the professional pecking order of Hollywood, anyone with solid commercial clout confirms these feelings by fiddling with their well established big screen personas. A laugh getter turns tender, or terrifying while the strong silent type struggles to make an ass out of himself. It’s called avoiding the typecast. It also means some interesting names have translated their talent into a turn at being the bad guy.

It was already poised to be a love/hate kind of experience. After all, the director, Harmony Korine, has been responsible for some of the most controversial (Kids, Ken Park) and head scratching (Trash Humpers) efforts in the last 20 years. As a screenwriter, he guided Larry Clark’s softcore slices of burned out youth culture, while his own directing duties have championed the outcasts and the unusual. Now comes his chance to cinematically ‘deflower’ a few of the teen idol babes from the House of Mouse/Nick at Nite school of celebrity. Spring Breakers, his artistically arresting view of the annual college ritual of excessive hedonism has made little impact at the box office ($5 million in less than 1000 theaters), but it’s definitely stirring some (often silly) debate.