If anyone could make a sensible adaptation out of David Wong's bizarro horror/comedy novel John Dies at the End, it would be writer/director Don Coscarelli. He gets weird. From the first two entries in the Phantasm series to the wild ride of Bubba Ho-Tep, Coscarelli has made a name for himself as a director of weird films. The quasi-Lovecraftian nightmare of Wong's fictional blog turned novel is right in his wheelhouse. His approach just might not be what you would expect.
In the present, Dave is meeting with a newspaper reporter named Arnie to come clean with his story about an alternate dimension's drug and monsters infecting our world. Dave tells Arnie the story of how he and John came to discover this disturbing alternate world that is invisible to the naked eye. Only a scant glance out of the corner of your eye can show you the horrors lurking everywhere if you do not take the Soy Sauce.
Wong's novel is very episodic in nature. It tells three interconnected stories with the same beats and locations about Dave and John fighting against the intrusion of an alternate dimension. The reason it works is that there are humans cooperating with the alternate dimension to control the world. They basically hit the reset button, erase the evidence, and leave John and Dave to take the fall for everything.
Coscarelli doesn't even address that concept in the film. He abandons a lot of the story elements that make John Dies at the End such an engaging read even with the oddly stilted and repetitive narrative structure. For Coscarelli's adaptation, the world is what it is and everything that happens actually happens. There are dark forces on earth to stop the truth from getting out but that is the beginning and the end of their powers.
Instead of constantly altering the timeline, Coscarelli finds the linear thread that connects the discovery of Soy Sauce to the wild ending of this adventure. The opening scenes follow the novel closely in a slightly shuffled order to give a wide sample of what John Dies at the End is about. Then he takes the story running in a straight direction with minor and inconsequential twists along the way.
That, right there, is the main problem in the film version of John Dies at the End. Dave and John make mistakes, sure, but the stakes aren't nearly as high as when the world is literally conspiring against their every action in the novel. The scenes lifted directly from the book work beautifully onscreen. The best sequence is all about the police station and it's as funny and horrifying in motion as it is on the page. The meat monster sequence is glorious, as well.
The scenes that are heavily reworked to stay on this unyielding linear path do not fair as well. The humor--all wordplay and absurdity in Wong's novel--is forced and off-putting in its sarcastic presentation onscreen. Parts of the story that made perfect sense because of the original rules of the world feel completely disjointed without the reset button mechanic waiting to push the adventure in a new direction. Coscarelli also writes the potential series into a corner--there are hundreds of stories already written in the universe and a second novel that would soar onscreen--by needlessly altering the trajectories and roles of characters who play much larger roles in other parts of the canon.
He also, oddly enough, deletes the entire middle act of the novel from the film. It's an odd omission requiring a massive jump in logic that does nothing to explain story elements taken for granted. That is when I realized that a linear approach, no matter how cleanly executed, is a detriment to this world.
John Dies at the End is not a bad film. It's just ridiculously safe for what it should have been. This is a wild story that's not supposed to make sense one hundred percent of the time and Don Coscarelli made it a linear, logic-tight horror comedy. It's far too pretty and clean to be a good adaptation of the novel but it's still way too weird in its subject matter to appeal to anything wider than a niche cult audience.
Rating: 5/10
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