Dave and John, two college drop-outs, are all that stands between humanity and threats from parallel universes.
Or John is dead and Dave has suffered a psychotic break after taking a new street drug nicknamed “Soy Sauce.”
This sci-fi/horror/black comedy is about how that happened.
Verdict
Saying that this is a Don Coscarelli movie does not prepare you for how weird it is.
Okay, I need to give two caveats right off.
First, I found David Wong’s novel, John Dies at the End, on the Staff Picks shelves at my local library. Yes, Crazy Uncle Rich is one of those weird people who still goes to actual libraries and takes out physical objects made of paper called “books.” Anyway, I loved the novel.
Second, I am a big Don Coscarelli fan. I’ve seen all the Phantasm movies, and all the Beastmaster movies. I saw (and loved) Bubba Ho-Tep. I saw the “Incident on and Off a Mountain Road” episode of Masters of Horror. I totally saw how Bubba Ho-Tep explored themes about aging, retirement, and finding a purpose in life.
I was really looking forward to John Dies at the End. In fact, I watched it twice.
It is not perfect. For example, Dave (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes) are not the most likeable people. They are underachievers and proud of it. We never see them make any attempt to improve their lives. They lack a lot of self-awareness. Where they shine is when we see their connections with other people – John and his band, Three Arm Sally, and Dave with his girlfriend, Amy (Fabianne Therese).
John, in particular, is the kind of smirking, smug, jerk that can really rub some people the wrong way (I thought he was mildly amusing).
The movie does make some changes from the book, but for the most part I think that eliminating sub-plots and combining characters actually brought the story into sharper focus.
This movie is about perception and the nature of reality.
Does anything exist when we do not observe it? For example, at one point, Detective Lawrence Appleton (Glynn Turman) tells Dave that John died after taking Soy Sauce. Yet we know John is still alive, because he is in the opening, which happens after the rest of the movie. Does John communicate with Dave from beyond the grave? Or do we see John only because Dave believes he is there?
How much can we trust our senses? John takes Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) out to his truck and shows him a monster in a cage. There’s certainly a cage there, but is there a monster? Perhaps John convinced Arnie that he should see a monster, so Arnie does. Arnie talks about the reputation that Dave and John have for dealing with weird stuff, but Arnie cannot be trusted as a narrator – for reasons that are obvious by the end of the movie, and that I don’t want to spoil for you.
If we can trust Detective Appleton as a narrator, then Dave and John are among four survivors of a party that ended in a terrible murder. However, at some point, the detective also takes the Soy Sauce. After that, his behavior becomes increasingly bizarre and we cannot trust what he says, either.
The movie never settles on whether the Soy Sauce opens up the mind and the perceptions to a truer nature of reality, whether it increases our ability to persuade others that our perspective is reality, or whether it causes psychotic breaks and hallucinations. It leaves that part up to you.
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Overall
If this all seems like terribly heavy stuff, rest assured that this movie has a doorknob that turns into a penis, a dog that drives a truck, a mustache that flies around the room, Clancy Brown as a self-help guru who actually knows what’s going on, and a walking, talking, monster made out of meat.
So, you know, you should see it. Because we need more risk-taking movies like this.
