Skip to main content

Spoiler alert: Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End

 Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown. Dir. Don Coscarelli, Magnet, 2012


Spoiler alert: He doesn't.

Because he doesn't, I'm ignoring all this film's many virtues. I'm ignoring its anarchic sensibility. I'm ignoring its hyper-aware, self-referential humor. I'm ignoring its deliberately-cheesy effects. I'm ignoring Paul Giamatti, who exec produced and gives a terrific performance, and veteran character actor Clancy Brown, who has a great deal of fun.

I'm ignoring everything that ought to make me ecstatically recommend this movie. If the title is John Dies at the End and John doesn't die at the end, the best you can say of yourself is that you're too clever for your own good. The worst you can say is that your film is a lie and a failure.

John Dies at the End is too clever for its own good. Fail. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Accidental Franchise: The Rambo movies

 FIRST BLOOD, RAMBO:FIRST BLOOD PT. II, RAMBO III, RAMBO, RAMBO:LAST BLOOD Sylvester Stallone, Brian Denehey, Richard Crenna, David Caruso. Dir. Ted Kotcheff, Tri-Star, 1982 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Julia Nickson, Martin Kove. Dir. George P. Cosmatos, Tri-Star, 1985 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna. Dir. Peter MacDonald, Tri-Star, 1988 Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Ken Howard. Dir. Sylvester Stallone, Weinstein Company, 2008 Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega. Dir. Adrian Grunberg, Lionsgate, 2019 My friend Alice sent me a few movies she got into over the last months. These include Mad Max:Fury Road and The Triplets of Bellevelle, as well as all five of Stallone's Rambo movies. My thoughts on them run below. The problem inherent to the Rambo movies is they each revive a character from a surprise-hit movie, but not his ongoing story, because the first film's genius conceit denied him any backstory. The movies all feature John Rambo, human killing machine, ...
2 comments
Read more

No Return:Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

 IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar. Dir. Stanley Kramer, MGM, 1963 I do not generally write about films I stop watching halfway. What's the point? I either have nothing positive to say about it or was in the wrong mood. In both cases I'm ignorant of its full length to perhaps do it justice. In the case of Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy smash, however, I feel compelled to make an exception.  My problem with the movie is not my mood, nor disappointment because it's not the movie I once heard. In fact, my biggest problem is that I haven't heard it described in glowing terms, or any, since I was about 9. See, IAMMMMW used to air anually on one or another of the networks, often in December. My parents didn't care for it and never watched it, but my friends watched anytime it aired and talked about it in rapturous terms. Until about 9-10 years old, when it seemed to drop out of conversation, or conv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Friday Flop: Adrian Lyne's 9&1/2 WEEKS

 Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke. Dir. Adrian Lyne, MGM, 1986 Style over sex, minus substance. That's a glib summation/dismissal of Adrian Lyne's 1986 blockbuster erotic drama, but it's not unfair or inaccurate. I took copious notes on this movie, most relating to some way Lyne and screenwriter Zalman King failed to make the film daring, dark, perverse, bold, or even a little erotic.  I noted, many times, that as an artifact of Hollywood's attempt to make sex-movies for an adult audience after home video made hardcore porn available to everyone, 9&1/2 WEEKS fascinates and depresses in equal measure. It's aesthetically fascinating, sociologically depressing. Lyne delivers a hyperstylized, superficial imagining of the US audience's "freaky" side and it's all pretty standard, you're-not-kinky-if-you-use-the-word-kinky kind of stuff.  Allegedly dom/sub-themed, both the film and the fantasies it trades in define predictable. A little gaslighting...
Post a Comment
Read more