John Dies at the End: Irreverent and Strange

John Dies at the End begins with a bit of a philosophical conundrum: if a hatchet that had previously had its blade replaced later also saw its shaft replaced, could it still, despite the utter lack of any of its original makeup, be accurately described as "the blade that chopped my head off?" (this from a reanimated corpse that has tied his own severed head back on with line from a weed whacker.)

It's a clever opening scene: an effective mix of the macabre and the irreverent wit that is indicative of all the supernatural shenanigans to follow in both tone and a complete inconsideration for any semblance of narrative sense. This scene, like the aforementioned corpse's head, is a part of a larger whole, but one that is tenuously connected at best.

The head was severed by the same guy who posed the conundrum about said head, Dave (Chase Williamson), who is one-half of a pair of meandering 20-somethings, the other half being his best friend, John (Rob Mayes). The two friends are college dropouts who don't seem able to hold down even part-time jobs, yet they also happen to be the last hope to save mankind from an otherworldly threat thanks to extrasensory abilities gained from the use of a black, seemingly alive drug called "Soy Sauce." Soy Sauce allows its users to traverse dimensions, observe and experience time outside of linear limitations and communicate with dead people such as John, who had expired long before he talks to Dave through a bratwurst in order to explain that the two friends can now see things no one else can see and do things no one else can do.

It's a difficult story for Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) to believe, but being an investigative journalist who needs to act as both the audience surrogate and the film's framing device, he continues to listen after Dave relays tales about fighting a monster made out of an animated collective of meat products and a spreading cloud of white, airborne spores that want to inhabit and then violently burst out of every human on earth until mankind is gradually eliminated.

Dave dryly relays his tales of inter-dimensional strangeness to Arnie with a sharp wit and malaise trademark of many 20-somethings who feel they've been there, done that—but when it comes to Dave, he actually has by the time he sits down to tell his story. It's a credit to Williamson that Dave's cracking wise as both a baffled, in-over-his-head victim as well as an imperturbable supernatural hero is wholly effective. His consistency as a humorist in the face of the absurd is one of the strong points of John Dies at the End because the film is so gleefully insane that not being able to laugh would have made this one of the most excruciating two hours you'd have to sit through all year.

With Don Coscarelli responsible for both adapting and directing David Wong's story, it shouldn't be any surprise that John Dies at the End has aspirations for cult classic status. Indeed, the man responsible for Bubba Ho-Tep and the Phantasm series hasn't shown much regard for mainstream sensibilities, but John Dies at the End, with B-grade effects, a story that seems to make up all the rules as it goes along, and axis of absurdity vs. narrative titled WAY in the direction of "what the fuck?" moments so blatantly and proudly aims for cult classic status that it disregards any convention that would help the audience understand what they're seeing, why they're seeing it, or why it's called John Dies at the End when he kicks the bucket well before the film even hits the 60-minute mark.

The fact that John Dies at the End swings so hard for the fences makes it a difficult film to accurately critique. I personally found it to be an unspeakably frustrating viewing, having given up very early in the viewing any hope that Coscarelli would show any concern for whether I was keeping up with him or not. However, John Dies at the End is so very good at being absurd and bucking any convention that one must believe that that was always the intent. By fulfilling its aspirations—be they admirable or not—it is, in its own way, a smashing success.