Review of John Dies at the End (2013) by Nathan H — 23 Oct 2013

I just finished reading the book, so I decided to watch the movie. The book itself would not be unfilmable, and while it has an already 'loose' plot the story is actually told in a fairly conventional manner.

This adaptation, however, just doesn't get it right. With an apparently non-existent budget and only 90 minutes with which to tell the tale, the film ends up taking a handful of highlights from the novel and randomly pasting them together. There isn't enough time for characterization, so you don't ever get to know John, David or the others and you don't know why you should care about them. The plot literally consists of several random scenes from the book told word for word and image for image on the screen, which doesn't make for a very coherent narrative.

The most tragic casualty in all of this? The character of Korrock and his shadow-people affiliates, who represented the most interesting metaphysical ideas from the book and really ends up making the literary version worth reading. I was very disappointed when they cut short Korrock's speech, and without it you lose any sense of meaning behind the conflict between Mr. Wong and the supernatural forces that surround him.

This could have been a great movie if it had much more resources at its disposal, but as it is it was a big let down for me.