John Dies at the End Reviews
Top CriticI stopped taking notes when the woman disintegrated into a ball of writhing snakes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Despite its astronomical body count, John Dies at the End never takes itself too seriously, and neither should you.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Director Don Coscarelli isn't especially smooth or coherent, and he leans on weird for weird's sake.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
How can a single movie contain all this awesome craziness?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
[It] eventually finds its own rhythm and meaningful chaos.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
As with most fantasy films, the story is secondary to inventive images and speculative ideas. And more than most, this one adheres to its own logic in ways that are continually entertaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"John Dies at the End" dies closer to the beginning, before writer-director Don Coscarelli's adaptation of the book of the same name has reached minute 20.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
What Coscarelli's achieved doesn't feel like an adaptation. It feels more like he seems he skimmed the source material, burned it, and then assembled a vague recollection on film after three days of untold indulgences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
A movie so brazenly off-kilter that I'm not entirely sure its title is even accurate.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The "wackiness" (scare quotes included) is mostly ceaseless and tiresome, from the ravenous zombie neo-Nazi that leads things off to the Galaxy Quest rejects that figure in the movie's annoyingly anticlimactic finale.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
It's the ultimate in spoiler titles. And this stoner Ghostbusters, an altered state disguised as a movie, may also add up to a hot cult item if silliness doesn't sabotage the scares
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
What may be the most freewheeling and imaginative film of Coscarelli's checkered career, loaded with tripped-out mood and nicely balanced between humor, horror and an underlay of genuine sweetness.
John lives in a frisky otherworld of willful incoherence all its own.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
John Dies at the End is joyously heterodox in its method, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mélange of sci-fi, black comedy, and action, with disquieting body-horror sight gags that at times recall David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.
A shaggy-dog story with restless leg syndrome.
When you're having great fun at a movie and suddenly you're not, where's the fun?
Once the colorful anecdotes sprawl out into an actual narrative, the film gets convoluted and loud, amplifying the weirdness without doing much to clarify it.
It's one of those films that might as well be announced with the words "cult classic" emblazoned on the marquee. It's an interesting failure that's almost worth seeing for that reason alone. Kind of. Not really.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old -- and, oh, it is terrible.
Coscarelli's direction seems well-suited to the free-wheeling material, bringing a critically light touch to a story with apocalyptic stakes.
Give or take the titular disclosure, John Dies at the End is a thoroughly unpredictable horror-comedy -- and an immensely entertaining one, too.
Horror-comedy from Phantasm director starts with a bang but quickly loses speed.
