Tag Archives: John Dies at the End

For Your Queue: Soy Sauce and Bug Powder

Slim pickin’s in the new release category this week, but if you feel like getting really high, we have a couple of options for you.

John Dies at the End tells the mind-bent tale of a couple slacker vigilantes hunting the supernatural. Dave (Chase Williamson) tells viewers how the twosome came to “handle unusual problems,” and the story he spills comes together in shades of Cronenberg, Burroughs, and Phillip K. Dick, spun with the sensibilities of Sam Raimi circa Evil Dead. That, friends, is good company. And though director Don Coscarelli (best known for Phantasm, but personally beloved for Bubba Ho-Tep) can’t keep the trippy logic afloat for the whole running time, its “whatevs” style of clever remains surprisingly enjoyable.

As long as we’re breaking the time-space continuum, let’s hit 1991 and the David Cronenberg film so frequently referenced in John Dies: Naked Lunch. Bill Lee’s a kind of an investigator, a writer, and, of course, an exterminator. Warped, beautiful and repellant, Cronenberg’s take on the William S. Burroughs classic is a SciFi adventure into Interzone where sex, writer’s block, addiction, guilt, transformation, and bug powder mesh gloriously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxYxiVfNk6M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtflS5wCbjw

Hey, your sandwich is talking to you

by Hope Madden

“You don’t choose the soy sauce. The soy sauce chooses you.”

If you hear these words while holding a bratwurst to your head like a cell phone, it would seem the soy sauce has indeed chosen you, as it has Dave and John in the mind-bender John Dies at the End.

Slacker vigilantes hunting the supernatural, Dave (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes) “handle unusual problems.” Like dealing with that meat monster in the hot girl’s basement – things like that. How did they come to this occupation? Well, that’s just what Dave is going to explain to a curious journalist (Paul Giamatti).

The tale he spills comes together in shades of Cronenberg, Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick, spun with the sensibilities of Sam Raimi circa Evil Dead. And that, my friends, is fine company.

Directed by Don Coscarelli (best known for Phantasm, but personally beloved for Bubba Ho-Tep), John Dies offers a fun hallucination on film. Its trippy logic doesn’t hold up for the full running time, but it’s certainly never dull, it boasts some fun cameos (Clancy Brown is particularly cool), and its “whatevs” style of clever remains surprisingly enjoyable.

3 stars (out of 5)