There's only one other person I know who has seen this movie, and that's the friend who recommended it to me, calling it the weirdest film he had ever seen.
Well, he wasn't exactly wrong. A demon made of snakes and frozen meat turns a door handle into a penis, before being exorcised by theatrical celebrity psychic Dr. Albert Marconi (Clancy Brown) over the phone (yes, really). That's not even anything directly to do with the main plot, it's just to introduce the main characters, John and David (Rob Mayes and Chase Williamson, respectively) and what they do.
The general gist of the plot is this: a drug called Soy Sauce allows people to travel through time and space and into alternate dimensions, but also causes them to clearly see weird monsters from those dimensions. David and John set out to stop the end of the world. How these two plot points are connected, well, would take too long to explain here. The movie never tries to make much more sense than the ramblings of someone who hasn't had enough sleep. The monster designs are reminiscent of The Thing (1982) or something out the works of David Cronenberg, but with a bit of a B-movie feel.
The movie is funny as often as it is weird, and has a few dashes of cleverness throughout the movie. Black comedy fills out most of the laughs; even character deaths are met with a giggle rather than a gasp. The opening scene sets the tone and style of the movie exactly, but unfortunately as the film's plot develops it begins to get overly convoluted, not impossible to follow just made unnecessarily difficult. The film also spends way too much time on its interesting encounters, to the point that by the time it comes to the climax of the film, the plot can only be explained to you in a bombard of exposition.
The Verdict: I want to say I would recommend this movie, but I can't for the life of me think of who I would actually recommend it to. The John Dies at the End is a bit of an oddball, not bad by any means, but extremely niche. It'll entertain those with a dark sense of humour, but even then the film doesn't help itself with its overly complex story. Definitely not for children.
Rating: 5.5/10
Watched January 3rd, 2016, Published July 3rd, 2016
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