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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 3 February 2014
This article is a review of JOHN DIES AT THE END. |
“That’s right Arnie, everything you know is wrong,” David Wong (Chase Williamson)
Lesson one, surely: If you don’t have adequate resources, don’t adapt a beloved novel. 'John Dies at the End' (2007) is perhaps the scariest and funniest books one has read. Combining frights and laughs on the page is rare. Doing it so well more unusual still. Not only that, there is an emotionality to the story, making us care about the outcome. Few screen incarnations have such a hold on an audience. Joss Whedon’s TV show BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER arguably the pinnacle. To mix awe, sarcasm and quips, the interpretation required that level of savvy. Horror director veteran Don Coscarelli births a disappointment. Non-aficionados though might get some divertissement from the unbalanced shenanigans.
Lesson one, surely: If you don’t have adequate resources, don’t adapt a beloved novel. 'John Dies at the End' (2007) is perhaps the scariest and funniest books one has read. Combining frights and laughs on the page is rare. Doing it so well more unusual still. Not only that, there is an emotionality to the story, making us care about the outcome. Few screen incarnations have such a hold on an audience. Joss Whedon’s TV show BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER arguably the pinnacle. To mix awe, sarcasm and quips, the interpretation required that level of savvy. Horror director veteran Don Coscarelli births a disappointment. Non-aficionados though might get some divertissement from the unbalanced shenanigans.
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Immediately we are given the riddle of the axes, which if we can solve, “will reveal the awful secret of the universe”. Then cut to a proper introduction to our guide to the paranormal goings-on, which exist on the periphery of our consciousness, David Wong. In an extremely budget set dressed to look like a downmarket Chinese restaurant, he waits. Enter reporter Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti – far too gifted an actor to be in such C-movie territory), who has come to interview Wong. Cult notoriety has built around David and the titular John (Rob Mayes), as a sort of small town Ghostbusters. Blondestone smells a feature mixed into his understandable scepticism – that dissipates as Wong reveals his heightened observational abilities (induced by an inter-dimensional sentient drug nicknamed by John as “soy sauce”). How the duo came to posses it, and what their new profession has uncovered, concerns the awesomely named JOHN DIES AT THE END.
Bonkers frozen meat monster, having the power to turn door handles into male genitalia, is the sort of manifestation a malevolent force takes as it tries to find a bridge into our world. Not spine-chilling (the cinematography should’ve had the eerie focus of THE X-FILES at its peak) nor particularly funny (a dude shambling in a rubber costume), typifies what on the page is pruriently imaginative yet on the screen is daft. BAD TASTE and BRAINDEAD era Peter Jackson is the sort of mindset hoped for; or to compare with modern fare, look no further than the glorious DETENTION (2011). To bring up to speed Blondestone and the audience, Wong goes back a night and then back years. A wet blandness permeates Williamson’s performance, instead of the desired brainy matter-of-factness. Faring worse, given their screen time, is the personality-less rest of the cast. JOHN DIES AT THE END just becomes exposition. In the right hands, and a production with deep enough pockets, something special was on the cards.
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