The soy sauce has got you.
It turns out of course, that it’s not exactly soy sauce… it’s an ethereal potion that opens the portals of the netherworld. Its side effects open your eyes to supernatural horrors, and allow you to communicate with the dead. And to go to other places… strange places.
This might sound like a recipe for a leaden exercise in horror/sci-fi paraody, but this film, that starts by asking a philosophical question about the true nature of an axe that beheads a reanimated corpse, has its own plans for you.
John Dies at the End feels like a collaborative effort between David Cronenberg, Richard Rodriguez and Eric Rohmer… with the screenplay written by William S. Burroughs. Or, more simply, like Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft had a weird little baby. And talked Salvador Dali into being the nanny.
John and David are barely able to hold down a job but have found themselves fighting supernatural evil. These two are Sam and Dean from Supernatural, if Sam Raimi wrote the show in full Evil Dead mode. And if you added a heaping helping of slacker/endearing loser to their personalities.
Get ready for madness. There is, after all, a monster made entirely out of freezer meat that can talk on cell phones (and a demon hunter from an infomercial that can destroy him). And a bratwurst that becomes a cell phone. And a Stanley Kubrick inspired alternate Earth with biological computers.
Filled with malevolent priests, Lovecraftian monsters and a fair amount of body horror, John Dies at the End will satisfy most horror fan’s desire for the gross and gruesome. But there’s more to it. There’s actually a series of philosophical conundrums at the center of the story. But don’t let that frighten you at all. Its serious side has more to do with jazzing and juicing up the crazy and turning a Lovecraftian horror of the infinite into sight gags and go-for-broke cinematic insanity.
Two things make this the best independent horror film released on blu-ray so far this year. First, it depends heavily on David Wong’s novel of the same name, a bizarre, punk rock song of a philosophical horror novel. Don Coscarelli’s adaptation does justice to the Wong’s crazy train. Nothing less could be expected from the man who brought us not only the Phantasm series but also the inspired Bubba Ho-Tep.
Second, its superbly acted. We don’t get to see much of Paul Giamatti as he undergirds the noir-ish framing narrative of a reporter listening to the story. But the main character (named David Wong in a moment of double irony) is a revelation as played by Chase Williamson. This is literally Williamson’s first role but, as Giamatti notes in one of the extras, no one will know this.
The blu-ray edition comes with some excellent deleted scenes. They are obviously cut to keep the length ( John Dies at the End comes in at about 99 minutes). But after seeing these scenes, you’ll wonder if they should have stayed in. In particular, it’s hard to explain the decision to take out an effects scene that includes both a popping eyeball gag and Molotov cocktails that don’t work.
Special features also include a Fangoria interview with Pail Giamatti where we find out that he’s a horror fan, at least of particular variety of off-kilter horror. Coscarelli’s Phantasm actually provided his introduction to the genre. He describes his production company, Touchy-Feely films, that focuses on what he calls “oddball genre” features.
A “creature effects” featurette shows us weirdness on a shoestring. Not surprisingly, almost no CGI goes into the film and so creatures like the “Brain scorpion” are essentially rod puppets built into the ceiling. In fact, one of the few places that digital effects do appear comes in the removal of the wires that manipulate this and similar creatures. Somewhat surprisingly, the giant Lovecraftian creature Korak gets little attention from the feature, even though he seems like a time, skill and money consuming effect. In fact, pulling a fake arm off one of the victims gets far more attention.
However, the meat monster does get some screen time and explanation. We get to see the fabrication of the foam suit that formed its base. We also learn that, apparently, FX artists used actual freezer meat to put him together and we get to see the process from the original sketches till the actor puts on the meat man outfit. We even are shown the making of the Spandex gloves (underneath bratwursts) that allow him to reach a grab with his hand full of hotdogs.
Unfortunately, the creature effects featurette comes in at around eight minutes, much too short give the likely cult status of this film (in fact, John Dies at the End has probably already reached that status).
Also surprising, given the popularity of the novel among fans and the writer/director’s efforts to be faithful to the book, there is no “book to film feature” or input from the author. The book has a cult status all its own and is maybe even more insane and philosophically interesting than the movie. It deserves its own featurette.
Crazed, over-the-top, intertextual and nodding to everything from literary horror to B-movies, John Dies at the End has to be seen if, like most fans, you didn’t get to catch it in the theatre. But it’s also good enough that it deserved better special features and more homage for its source material.