John Dies at the End

This might give you sort of an idea.

"Just so you know...they're sorry for anything that's about to happen."

Why hello everyone, it is that time again! Time for The Tagline, time for rambling, and time for a bizarre trip through an incredibly strange movie called John Dies at the End. Starring who gives a crap as everyone (Except for Paul Giamatti, who is a journalist interviewing Dave). Dave is a typical nobody, and his friend John is a dumb nobody, and together, they are no one of importance. UNTIL ONE NIGHT WHEN SHIT STARTS GETTING MAD WEIRD, because they do some bizarre drug called Soy Sauce, which gives them an... expanded view of the universe. Not a good one though. A weird one. A terrifyingly freaky view, of a lot of things you'd probably not care to see. Thanks to that, Dave and John find themselves in them middle of some truly freaky shit, involving body stealing, corpse exploding insects, spirits that make meat-Voltron, world jumping, and a giant, hideous organic machine-god named Korrak. To put it succinctly, this shit is seriously fucked.

Don't inject strange things, or keep bare needles in your pants.

So that's the aerial view, but what about a little more detail? As you might guess from the above summary, this film is not taking itself especially seriously, nor is it trying to fit into any particular one genre, hence the industrial accident collection of genre tags on the post; I probably could have tacked on a few more but I figured those got the point across. The film is based principally on a novel of the same name, written by David Wong (which is by the way the name of one of the protagonists, the above mentioned Dave). The genre-bending of the film would probably be one of the more jarring aspects of the film for a lot of viewers, who would generally expect (and understandably so) that the movie would be occult, or sci-fi, or about monsters, but not all of them one after the other in some bizarre conveyor belt buffet of strangeness. Having not much in the way of expectations to begin with in regards to this movie, I just kind of went with it, and I think that's basically the only way you can approach a movie like this without wasting your time.

Don't leave stuff in the fridge.

The movie is kind of gory, but in an incidental and not especially realistic way, so I didn't really find that to be disturbing or anything. I mean, yeah plenty of blood, but it's all pretty stagey. The writing is generally speaking a pretty decent grade of snark, and the movie is genuinely funny, because it kind of doesn't seem to give a shit about the audience or expectations. It's just doing its own bizarre shit, and I liked that about it. The plot is almost incidental to the showcase of the bizarre going on, and seems more to exist as a vehicle for jokes and situational irony than the other way around, but that mostly works here too, for me at least.

An effective summation of much of my life.

Of course I'd read in some reviews that the movie sometimes seemed like it was being weird just for the sake of weirdness, and I can't say I didn't feel that way sometimes too. There were moments where I felt like the movie would have benefited from indulging itself a big less. In the end the movie feels too short to get out all the weird it wants to. I feel like what I really wanted was for this movie to be a tv show, so it could just keep being a new kind of weird every episode, and I could just keep enjoying it and laughing about it with the writers. It sort of reminded me of Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, a truly awesome and unspeakably stupid Canadian television program, which ended long before its time, though it having received two full seasons was surprising in and of itself. The long story short is watch this movie if you enjoy movies that are weird and don't give a shit, because otherwise you're missing out.

That's it for today! Join me again on Thursday for more fun in the sun. Or something.