Review: 'John Dies at the End' is energetic horror-comedy nonsense

By Robert Abele

Jan. 24, 2013 12 AM PT

Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal “John Dies at the End” has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.

Cynical slacker Dave (Chase Williamson) meets jaded journalist Arnie (Paul Giamatti) to tell him about a powerful street drug called “soy sauce.” After Dave and buddy John (Rob Mayes) have ingested the substance, they find themselves on an adventure involving co-opted life-forms, mind reading and dimension-traveling insects.

The result is an energetically nonsensical stew from horror outlier Don Coscarelli (“Phantasm,” “Bubba Ho-Tep”), working from the same-named cult novel.

There are enough chunky bits of tongue-in-cheek — namely in the enjoyably deadpan performances, including Glynn Turman as a philosophical, shotgun-wielding cop — to satisfy aficionados of cross-bred genre experiments.

But by the time attention must be paid to actual narrative momentum, the loose fun of nutty encounters with a monster made of frozen meat, a combatant whose mustache rips off and flies away and a drug-affected dog named Bark Lee, gives way to the forced whimsy of stop-the-apocalypse comedy, a subgenre that already feels passé in the fantasy/horror world.

Until then, however, “John” lives in a frisky otherworld of willful incoherence all its own.

calendar@latimes.com

------------------

‘John Dies at the End’

MPAA rating: R for bloody violence and gore, nudity, language and drug content

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Playing: The Nuart, West Los Angeles