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60Gonzo freakiness in such doses that cult status is practically ensured.
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63Despite its astronomical body count, John Dies at the End never takes itself seriously, and neither should you.
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75John Dies at the End is easily funnier than it is scary, and much like the drug at the center of the story, it offers one hell of a trip.
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63This loopy slacker horror farce is so intent on playing with your head — and time, and space, and paranoid conspiracy theories — that it doesn’t care about making sense. Which doesn’t stop the film from being a pretty good bad time.
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Feb 21, 201330The whole movie is an inside joke, a shaggy-dog tale that asks us to pay close attention to its twists and turns, but never rewards us for doing so.
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25Every single thing wrong with John Dies at the End might have been avoided had John died at the beginning, along with all the other characters, transforming an awful full-length movie into a harmless five-minute short.
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75Some of the themes and the hallucinatory special effects are reminiscent of Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” and there are cheeky allusions to “Dawn of the Dead” and even “Eyes Wide Shut,” but a viewer with an open mind might say that this midnight-style movie is more enjoyable than any of them.
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75John Dies at the End isn't deep. But it is deeply amusing, in the sickest possible way.
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Feb 7, 201363Coscarelli knows how to exploit horror/sci-fi tropes and adeptly meld a practical effect with a well-timed gag. Many could depict a man's disembodied moustache with the right degree of farcicality, but few can imbue it with such an oddball credibility.
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38This is a fantasy grab bag in which nearly anything can happen.
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25A supernatural horror-comedy that's frighteningly lacking in wit, John Dies at the End thinks it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for dudes. But in its randomness, its vulgarity and its level of humor, it's more like the collected writings on the walls of a roadside men's room.
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60This is really the kind of movie that was made to be watched in a haze after midnight, at which point it would all, no doubt, make perfect sense.
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80It lays waste to linear narration, thematic coherence, psychological plausibility and just about everything else you might expect to encounter. It zigs, zags and trips over its own feet and on its own home-brewed hallucinogens. It's a ridiculous, preposterous, sometimes maddening experience, but also kind of a blast.
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63Before it trips over its own overly complex plot, before the comic leads have exhausted their modestly amusing repertoires, this odd stoner/sci fi creature feature blows out of the gate and threatens - for about thirty minutes - to blow your mind. Then it doesn't.
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20This frenetic horror-comedy from "Bubba Ho Tep's" Don Coscarelli is of the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of storytelling.
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63Coscarelli junkies won't be bothered by the film's herky-jerky rhythms. Go for the freaky fun of it, though a little soy sauce on the side sure wouldn't hurt.
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80Is this an "indie" film with a deliberately messed-up chronology and an ambitious narrative you'll appreciate even more the second time through? Yes. Is this a deliberately trashy horror-comedy with a few decent jolts and several big laughs, best viewed with a gang of friends and a consciousness-altering agent of your choosing, parasitical or not? That too.
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60Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal John Dies at the End has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.
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80A gleefully crummy buddy comedy that uses horror-movie conventions as catapults to hurl the audience down one "whoa, dude!" narrative wormhole after another.
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55Once the colorful anecdotes sprawl out into an actual narrative, the film gets convoluted and loud, amplifying the weirdness without doing much to clarify it.
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50Another is how the film manages, in the absence of a coherent plot, to be so funny and engaging until, somewhere around the midpoint, it goes as flat as a stepped-on creepy-crawly.
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50Coscarelli's screenplay introduces an abundance of intriguing concepts but never goes very far with any of them. The characters are paper thin and the special effects are laughably bad.
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10John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old-and, oh, it is terrible.
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Jan 21, 201325The frantic, grotesque imagery ironically only highlights Don Coscarelli's inability to truly cut ties with the constraints of accepted storytelling.
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50A supernatural action comedy that can never live up to its exciting opening scenes, Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End mixes horror-tinged mayhem with smart-alec laughs but loses momentum early and gets bogged down in exposition.
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80Give or take the titular disclosure, John Dies at the End is a thoroughly unpredictable horror-comedy -- and an immensely entertaining one, too.
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75It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.