Review of John Dies at the End (2013) by Jason L — 12 Jan 2015

I expected much better than this. The plot and concept is pretty good, and it's sort of a goofball (or at least more so) Phantasm. It's too bad it's not nearly as memorable or as good as Phantasm or Bubba Ho-Tep.

First, the characters (while having some okay dialogue and interaction) are pretty forgettable. The most memorable (for me) was the dog. The plot is incoherent, but that was the intention so I'm not going to be too harsh. It just did not work for me. It felt more like random for random's sake instead of something that was naturally free flowing. The green screen is so bad that this looks like an early 2000s direct-to-video movie. It was inexcusably bad. There's no real payoff and I didn't really understand what the point was.

Fortunately, so much randomness happens that it doesn't feel like that long of a movie, and there are some laughs, but it was still a disappointment.