In this case, however, he’s not alone, because that’s precisely the term that enthusiastic audiences all over North America and Europe used most often while Don Coscarelli toured John Dies at the End around the festival circuit last year. How else would you describe an adaptation of a novel about two underachiev- ers who dabble in a black, liquid street drug called “Soy Sauce” that promises wild hallucinations but ac- tually transports users into different dimensions and eventually returns them home, permanently altered and increasingly aware that only they can stop a war that’s brewing between factions on other planes of existence that will eventually spill over into ours?
W The story is told largely in flashback (or is it?) by
college dropout Dave (Chase Williamson) to free- lance writer Arnie (Paul Giamatti, who also produced) on a slow night at a Chinese restaurant. Arnie vacil- lates between scepticism and fascination as Dave details the misadventures he and his best friend John (Rob Mayes) have recently had in other dimen- sions through the use of Soy Sauce. But they didn’t use the drug so much as the drug used them, and now the fate of humanity is in the hands of two un- likely and extremely reluctant anti-heroes. Encoun- ters with a meat monster, a talking dog, a penis doorknob, phone calls from the dead, Lovecraftian tentacled critters, a cult of topless women and Clancy Brown (that’s right, Clancy Brown) ensue, and that list barely scratches the surface. And it’s all fleshed out with more gunplay, explosions and graphic carnage than all four Phantasmfilms put to- gether. Those used to more mainstream fare might well describe the visuals as a dream team collabo- ration between John Carpenter and Terry Gilliam, liberally spiced with early David
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Cronenburg; those in the know would simply call it pure Coscarelli. Despite his notoriety for fierce independence, the
filmmaker briefly toyed with the idea of seeking stu- dio financing through Giamatti (p. 19), but both soon agreed that they’d be better off with a lower budget and no outside interference. For a director who’s long been used to crafting bizarre worlds on stingy budgets, John Dies seems like the perfect vehicle, albeit one with higher stakes than he’s had to deal with before. Like most of Coscarelli’s oeuvre, nothing is as it
seems in John Dies, and by the time the characters get things figured out it’s usually too late. This is a filmmaker whose previous work shows a great pre- occupation with conflicting notions of reality (partic- ularly between characters) but it’s safe to say that not even the most bizarre aspects of the Phantasm series – with its flying spheres, inter-dimensional undertaker and Martian midgets – ever pushed it quite as far as this film. Perhaps art imitates life to a certain de-
HEN THE MAN WHO DIRECTED ALL FOUR PHANTASM FILMS, BUBBA HO-TEP AND THE BEASTMASTER DESCRIBES HIS NEW FEATURE AS “BATSHIT CRAZY,” ONE IS WELL ADVISED TO TAKE HIM AT HIS WORD.