These days when a film is described as having a cult following that generally means it falls into the so-bad-it’s-good category. But films like Sharktopus and Sharknado that paradoxically set out to be deliberately terrible have actually become big business with a huge number of fans who have a confused understanding of irony. But describing a film as a cult movie used to imply that it had a small following, usually not big enough to make the film particularly successful, but one that is fiercely devoted.
And Don Coscarelli is a proper old school cult filmmaker. His films are low-budget and so deeply weird that they have no chance of attaining mainstream success but attract a faithful following of appreciative fans. He’s most famous for the Phantasm series with its flying metal balls of death and in 2008 made the cultiest film imaginable with his masterpiece Bubba Ho-Tep, which was about an aging Elvis Presley battling an ancient mummy in a Texas retirement home.
It’s hard to imagine Coscarelli ever making anything mainstream and he likely plans his next project by seeking out the weirdest and most eccentric source material he can find. So he must have been over the moon when he discovered David Wong’s truly insane genre-splicing novel.
It’s very hard to summarise the plot in any way that makes sense, but I’ll give it a go. Slacker buddies David (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes) sample a new drug known as Soy Sauce. But unlike most hallucinogens, which just make the user feel like they’re travelling through time and space, this is the real deal and sends the boys into alternate dimensions. But as the drug becomes more popular and more people take the trip some of them come back changed and quite possibly not alone.
It’s a lot freakier than even that synopsis suggests and this is the kind of film that really isn’t bothered about making sure its audience is keeping up with it. If you aren’t familiar with concepts like parallel universes and inter-dimensional travel you’re going to be lost and very confused.
Luckily you’ll also be nicely amused as the film is very funny. It mixes infantile humour with cleverly observed characters in way that’s reminiscent of Kevin Smith at his best. It has a swaggering sense of self-awareness so that even at its climax when it becomes utterly, almost incomprehensibly insane it’s generated enough goodwill that you want to stick with it. In fact it made me want to watch the whole thing again to see if I could decipher the narrative gymnastics it performs.
Like he did with Bubba Ho-Tep, Coscarelli makes a virtue out of his low budget. With that horror-comedy flick he relied on old-school practical effects that made the mummy feel like it had wandered off the set of a 30s universal horror. Here he goes in completely the other direction and uses some pretty shoddy and cheap looking CGI. It seems like a deliberate choice and bizarrely works in the films’ favour as it makes the more sci-fi inflected scenes feel like a videogame sequence which reflects the immature young male perspective of its heroes and suggests (to me at least) that maybe it all really is happening in the mind of its protagonists.
The cast are all perfectly adept at balancing the humour and the madness but the real star of the movie is Paul Giamatti. He’s also a producer on the film as well as playing the deceptively unflashy role of Arnie Blondeston, a journalist interviewing David. The fact that he’s an Oscar-nominated and extremely well-respected actor, but is still dedicated to helping low-budget, high-concept films like this get made makes him a hero in my book and if I ever meet him I intend to salute him.
John Dies at the End is destined to become a cult classic so if you like mind-bending sci-fi and knob gags you should definitely buy it so you can brag that you were one it’ earliest fans.
Overall Verdict: A very, very strange mix of comedy and sci-fi that’s always one step ahead of you and has no interest in mass appeal. If you have a fondness for juvenile humour and mind-bending concepts than this is a cult you should join.
Special Features:
Feature length commentary with cast and crew
Deleted scenes
Getting Sauced: The Making of John Dies at the End
Creature Crops: The Effects of Soy Sauce
Casting Sessions
Fangoria Interview with Paul Giamatti
Trailer
Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon