JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012)

Studio:       Magnet Releasing
Director:    Don Coscarelli
Writer:       Don Coscarelli, David Wong
Producer:  Brad Baruh, Don Coscarelli, Andy Meyers, Roman Perez
Stars:     Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Clancy Brown, Glynn Turman, Doug Jones, Daniel Roebuck, Paul Giamatti

Review Score:

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Summary:

Two friends and a dog must save mankind from an otherworldly invasion after a sentient drug called Soy Sauce infects users by granting strange psychic abilities. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Through a voice-over, Dave Wong asks a riddle whose answer will reveal the awful secret behind the universe. Dave uses an axe to behead a zombie, but breaks the axe handle in the process. Dave repairs the axe with a new handle from the hardware store. One morning, a small creature appears in his kitchen and he uses the axe again. This time, the blade breaks. Dave repairs the axe with a new blade from the hardware store. Back at home, the zombie Dave killed in the opening scene returns with a new head and says, “that’s the axe that slayed me!” Dave asks, “is he right?”

Reporter Arnie Blondestone meets with Dave in a Chinese restaurant, and Dave begins telling his story. While watching an infomercial for psychic spiritualist Doctor Albert Marconi, Dave receives a phone call from John. At John’s request, Dave goes to John’s place. The two friends meet with a girl named Shelly who says her undead boyfriend is harassing her. The trio goes to the basement of Shelley’s house to investigate. While talking to each other, Dave and John realize that each of them sees Shelly with a different physical appearance. Shelly appears and turns into a bundle of snakes. The doorknob turns into a penis, preventing the two friendss from turning it and leaving. A cooler of meat products assembles itself into a sentient meat monster and mistakes the duo for Marconi. They offer to put the monster on the phone with Marconi and Marconi dispatches the creature over the phone.

Back in the restaurant, Dave accurately predicts the change in Arnie’s pocket and identifies the dates on each coin to prove his heightened abilities. He then accurately describes Arnie’s dream from the night before. Dave then tells Arnie that the story begins two years ago when he went to see John perform with his band Three Arm Sally at a party. Dave talks to his friend Fred Chu by the keg. Justin White plays a joke on Amy Larking by taking her prosthetic hand and throwing it over towards Dave. Amy tells Dave that she has to find her dog because it just bit a Jamaican guy. Dave finds the Jamaican guy, who is impressing partygoers by levitating. The Jamaican guy tells Dave about his last dream and explains its meaning, which mystifies Dave. Dave returns to his truck and finds Amy’s dog, Bark Lee. He takes the dog home.

That night, Dave receives a frantic phone call from John. Dave goes to John and finds him behaving erratically. On the table is a shipping slip. John has no recollection of calling Dave. Dave decides to take John to a hospital. In John’s pocket, Dave finds a syringe. The two friends go to a coffee shop. John says the syringe is filled with a strange drug called Soy Sauce that he got from the Jamaican guy at the party. Among other things, the drug gives John the ability to remember events that have not yet happened. Dave receives a phone call from John even though he is sitting across from him.

Back in the car, Dave calls a priest named Father Shellnut for advice. During the call, Dave accidentally pricks himself with the needle. He sees that the drops from the syringe are alive and he begins hallucinating. Later, a man named Roger North suddenly appears in the backseat. Roger attaches a creature to Dave’s chest and forces Dave to drive. John is passed out. Roger cryptically speaks of an adversary named Korrok and Dave’s important role. Dave uses the car’s cigarette lighter to burn the creature from his chest and then points a gun at Roger. Dave exits the car to finish killing the creature and finds Roger has disappeared when he returns. Detective Lawrence Appleton then appears next to the car and takes Dave and John to the police station.

Appleton interrogates Dave about what happened at the party by the lake. Appleton tells Dave that nine people went to the One Ball Inn after the party. Three of them are missing, five are dead, and John is the only known survivor. Appleton is called from the room. When he returns, he tells Dave that John died.

At the restaurant, Dave takes Arnie outside and shows him a creature in his car to prove that he is telling the truth about all of the strange happenings. Continuing the story, Dave receives a phone call from John, even though John is dead, telling Dave to leave the police station. John tells Dave that the police officer in the room with him is not real. Dave fights the man, whose mustache turns into a creature, and eventually escapes. John proves the surreal nature of their situation by having Dave purchase a bratwurst on the street and using it like a phone.

Dave is directed to the trailer park home of Robert Marley, the Jamaican guy from the party. Inside, he watches footage of himself on the television being shot by Detective Appleton. In the kitchen, Dave finds two pills of Soy Sauce that turn into flies. One flies into his mouth while the other burrows into his face. Dave has a vision of distracting a man at a munitions factory. Appleton enters with a can of gasoline. Appleton tells Dave that when he came to Marley’s to investigate the deaths, he found gangsta wannabee Justin White being consumed by small creatures, but he was untouched when Appleton returned with a shotgun. Appleton just wants to destroy everything. He shoots Dave but the dud bullet from the munitions factory bounces off his chest. With the trailer on fire, Bark Lee drives the truck into the wall and rescues Dave.

John speaks to Dave telepathically through Bark Lee. The Soy Sauce creatures are taking over the planet by hatching inside the host bodies. Justin White waits for Dave at his home. Justin is now consumed by a creature who calls himself “Sh*tload.” Justin captures Dave.

Dave awakens in the back of a truck with John, Fred, Amy, and Bark Lee. Justin takes them to The Mall of the Dead. Inside the abandoned mall is a ghost door. John sees the package that he sent to himself earlier. Justin opens it and the note inside the box leads him to a trashcan outside the mall. When Justin goes to investigate, Appleton appears and kills him. Appleton then captures the group, but he explodes when the creatures hatch inside of him. Freddie is then consumed by the creatures and Dave shoots him. Back in the mall, Amy uses her phantom limb to open the ghost door, but only Dave, John, and Bark Lee make it through.

On the other side, Roger North meets Dave and John. Marconi also appears and explains that Dave and John have the ability to pass through to the other side of the portal in front of them. They are needed to defeat Korrok. Marconi gives them “The Tripper,” a C4 bomb with a hallucinogen, and the duo goes through the portal with Bark Lee to incapacitate Korrok.

In an alternate universe, Dave and John are met by a Largeman surrounded by naked men and women. Everyone is wearing a mask. Dave and John are taken to a shrine in their honor as their coming had been foretold by legend. Largeman explains that their two worlds were on similar timelines that separated with the birth of Cyrus Rooney in 1848. In Dave and John’s world, Rooney died in Tennessee at the age of 17 when he was gored to death while trying to crossbreed a bull with a Clydesdale. In Largeman’s world, Rooney lived and continued his experiments in beastiology. This led to breakthroughs in creating insectile flying machines and a thinking machine from the brain of a pig. When Rooney died, his creation of a bio-organic computer gained sentience and named itself Korrok. Korrok carried on Rooney’s work to advance mankind. Those who did not conform underwent re-education, which is the term for using giant spiders to kill them.

Largeman takes Dave and John to Korrok’s chamber. Those with special wisdom are sacrificed to Korrok so that Korrok may assimilate their knowledge. Largeman plans to serve Dave and John to Korrok so that Korrok can learn how to travel through the portal and conquer Earth. Dave and John resist the henchman but drop the bomb in the process. Bark Lee picks up the bomb and sacrifices himself by jumping into Korrok while Dave and John escape. Back in their world, Marconi explains that Dave and John were actually Bark Lee’s escorts. Bark Lee was psychically connected to Marconi ever since he bit Marley at the lake party. Dave and John were used because they were innocuous and would not be seen as a serious threat.

Dave finishes telling his story to Arnie. Dave realizes that Arnie is actually an old black man, even though Dave sees him as a balding white man. They go outside and find Arnie’s dead body in his car’s trunk. Someone killed Arnie after Dave contacted him and he now exists only in Dave’s imagination. Dave blinks Arnie out of existence.

Dave and John are shooting hoops when their basketball goes through a portal. On the other side, men appear claiming that Dave and John’s coming had been prophesized and they are needed to save this other world. Dave and John say that they have to retrieve some items first and then just go back to their own world, leaving the men on their own.

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Review:

“John Dies at the End,” or “JDATE” for those who prefer an affectionate abbreviation, is such a psychotropic joyride through horrifyingly imaginative ideas about time, space, and multidimensional alien takeovers that describing it in the limited terms available on this Earth does it a disservice.  JDATE begins by posing a hypothetical question about a resilient zombie, a grotesque space slug, and a hand axe that just cannot keep it together.  Anyone left scratching his/her head after these first three minutes will still have that itch for the next hour and a half.  But anyone cracking a smile when the riddle is revealed can buckle up for that aforementioned joyride.

Describing buddies Dave and John as slackers would not be quite accurate.  Regardless of their slightly disheveled college kid appearances, they know how to step up when it comes time to battle interplanetary forces and demonic veal cutlets.  A sentient alien drug dubbed “Soy Sauce” has the somewhat desirable side effect of granting transcendent psychic abilities such as remembering events that have not yet happened.  What the drug’s users do not know is that they are actually playing host to the machinations of an otherworldly monster determined to rule the planet.  Guess who stands in that monster’s way?

Rob Mayes plays John as a more manic Jerry O’Connell while Chase Williamson’s Dave is a more subdued Topher Grace.  Together, the duo takes the reins of a sometimes unsteady jalopy and grounds the far out fantasy with a touch of reality that is surprisingly relatable.

Writer/director Don Coscarelli paces the script, based on Justin Pargin’s novel, with a staccato mania that hardly takes a breath.  Save for a brief musical interlude during a party scene, there is rarely more than a 10 second gap between lines of dialogue, exchanged at a rate of witticism that would make Trapper and Hawkeye proud.  Even scenes of Dave recounting his tale for reporter Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) while seated in a Chinese restaurant take on a frenetic urgency.  Their sweat-beaded foreheads stare each other down while sorting out impossible revelations that Arnie wants to believe, even if his rational mind tells him otherwise.  His rapt attention echoes the audience’s while everyone eagerly anticipates the next brain-teasing tidbit of mindbending forbidden knowledge.

JDATE is brimming with ideas that it literally cannot afford to realize.  Sadder than the prospect of an impending apocalypse is the dawning notion that JDATE is felled by the arrow of its production checkbook.  That Coscarelli even attempted such a broadly imaginative narrative despite missing a zero in the bank account is admirable.  Though there are places in the story where wild thoughts burst at seams that are quickly sewn up due to necessity.  A good film could have been exceptional if it had the ability to take off its leash and run in every direction it pointed.

Being no stranger to wild ideas on restrictive budgets, Coscarelli still shows his talent for making lemonade by finding inventive ways to wring out a penny like a soaked sponge, and uncovers humor in the process.  The meat monster with a turkey head and hot dog sinew is one of the most memorable and original creatures in any recent horror film.  Substituting a giant spider massacre with a creative cartoon not only tackles the visual presentation challenge, but the animated diversion adds unique opportunities for comedy.  In some ways, the budgetary drawbacks evident on certain FX almost fit the movie’s tone.  Green screen halos that would make George Lucas cringe have a charm befitting Dave and John’s rough-edged personalities.  And the personality of JDATE, as well.

Like Dave and John, “John Dies at the End” is so likeable that it is hard not to forgive it for being occasionally unreliable.  Ire at good friends is usually short-lived, and that is the case here, too.  Keeping with that metaphor, “John Dies at the End” is like that friend who shows up at midnight and says, “get in the car” without telling you the destination.  Although annoyed by having to get out of bed and entertain a borderline mental case, part of you is thankful that you even know someone out of the ordinary who can inject a breath of adventure into an otherwise dull life.  Sometimes you just have to throw average to the wind and take a chance on experiencing something uniquely entertaining.

Review Score:  85

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