John Dies at the End

I finished this movie a couple of hours ago.  I often take some time after a movie to think and ponder on what I watched, but even after this time thinking I’m not really sure what just happened.

“John Dies at the End” is twisted and funny, a little creepy, original, unnerving, confusing, revealing, confusing again, and highly enjoyable.  I’ve never been so happy to watch something that makes me so confused about what’s going on.  Even after this time I’m not sure what Marconi is all about or even who he is other than a mentalist who knows about the other universe.  Doug Jones, who I love to see in movies because he is an Indiana native and a Ball State grad much like myself, plays Roger Smith who is…I don’t actually know, but I love it. 

In this world a new drug has hit the streets, Soy Sauce.  It creates violent hallucinations that aren’t actually hallucinations.  After watching craziness happen for thirty minutes you learn that Soy Sauce allows the user to see entities that always surround us, but we never see.  The detective in the movie described it as “hell,” but if I understand everything correctly they are beings from a parallel universe…or something.  Either way, David and John, our main characters, are chosen to defeat Korrok, a genetically crafted super computer/creature that gains information by eating people.

In a movie this confusing, the simple mission of the main characters, although it isn’t fully established until most of the movie is over, is important to keep the audience interested.  I don’t count myself as brilliant, but I believe I’m decently intelligent and I didn’t understand everything that was thrown at me in this movie, so I suspect other people will have similar troubles.  The simple plot is important to ground the movie and give the audience something to understand.  If it was just craziness for an hour and a half I would have lost interest and eventually zoned out. 

I did have a problem with the amount of dick jokes in this movie though.  And I’m not a stickler on dick jokes, I make enough of them myself, but this movie seemed to use phallic comedy as a crutch, or kick-stand if you will.  Random penis references are dropped everywhere, some are funny but many left me scratching my head and wondering if they could’ve found a bigger joke.  Case in point, when David and John first enter Korrok’s layer Korrok says “Your dick is smaller in person.”  It is kind of funny that an omniscient being’s first words to someone would be something so trivial, but the joke turns on the assumption that saying the word dick makes me laugh.  In middle school that would have been brilliant writing, but now you’re going to have to try a little harder than that creepy guy only wearing a trench coat.

3.5/5