Pick of the week: Exorcists, zombies and bromance, oh my!

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

I come to bury “John Dies at the End,” not to praise it. Of course, after burying it I’ll dig it up again, replace its head with a frozen turkey and send it, staggering and undead, to batter down your door in the middle of the night with a bloody shovel. So lend me your ears, detached from your head.

One thing that Paul Giamatti said in our conversation about Don Coscarelli’s crazily inventive horror movie (adapted from a similarly nutso novel by David Wong), which Giamatti appears in and helped produce, is that the film’s mode is “excess.” That’s both true and not true. Coscarelli throws us into the middle of a bewildering story about two small-town exorcists who are battling extra-dimensional invaders while addicted to a mysterious street drug called “soy sauce” that alters time, space and human perception and seems to be a parasitical organism with its own agenda. And even before that, the movie begins with a gruesome and hilarious philosophical puzzler, a kind of shaggy-dog anecdote that has nothing to do with the so-called story. (For the record, my answer to the vengeful zombie’s unanswerable Zen-koan question is yes.)

Paul Giamatti and Don Coscarelli on “John Dies at the End”

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Here’s the problem with explaining how cool it is that veteran character actor Paul Giamatti and cult horror director Don Coscarelli (he of the “Phantasm” series) have joined forces to make a thoroughly deranged, time-stretching, alternate-universe, hallucinatory horror-comedy called “John Dies at the End.” Either you’re already incredibly excited by what I’ve just written, or your reaction is a bit more polite and confused -- Don who? This isn’t making any sense -- and you’re starting to back toward the door with a polite smile on your face.

Well, please don’t go yet, because if you do you’ll accidentally ingest a drug that will make you start receiving cellphone calls from dead people (channeled through hot dogs), be attacked by unreal police officers, undead street-talkin’ white boys and monsters assembled from a freezer-case full of frozen meat, and discover that what you thought was a defunct fast-food franchise in a dead shopping mall is actually a portal to another universe. Such is the simultaneously unsettling and ridiculous world of “John Dies at the End,” which was first a crackpot cult novel by David Wong (the nom de plume of humorist Jason Pargin), and has now been adapted for the screen by writer-director Coscarelli, one of the genuine underappreciated geniuses of American cinema.

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Pick of the week: Exorcists, zombies and bromance, oh my!

Paul Giamatti and Don Coscarelli on “John Dies at the End”