Gotta Get that Sauce

I think it's fair to say that John Dies at the End, the first novel from David Wong (one-time Editor-in-Chief of Cracked.com) is a nigh unfilmable novel. That's a funny thing to say leading into a review of the film of said novel, but we have to acknowledge that the source material is so much weirder than anything the film could get on screen. That's not to say the production team doesn't try, but there's a lot of material, and a lot of weirdness, left on the cutting room floor because it just wouldn't work in a film.

That's a roundabout way to say that, for all its flaws, the 2012 film John Dies at the End is probably about as good of a film as we could expect to get from the source material, all things considered. It's not the best film, but it does manage to capture to tone and style of the book, while retaining a number of memorable scenes and, honestly, about as much plot as you could get from a novel that's really just a collection of novellas strung together into book-length. The original novel is a fantastic read, but the 2012 film is just a pretty decent movie that has the style of the movie, and that's probably all we should really expect.

In the movie, as in the book, we're introduced first to David Wong (Chase Williamson), paranormal investigator, who wants to recount his story to a reporter, Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti). The story is a series of strange happenings that David and his best friend, John (Rob Mayes), have gone through in their shitty, run-down town. it all relates to "the sauce", a weird, black substance that John ingested on a wild night of partying, and then somehow Dave ended up with some of it in his system as well. Being on the sauce is like having all your senses amplified, as well as having some kind of psychic abilities, predictive abilities, and sixth senses out the whazoo. But once you're on the sauce it never really leaves your system and you're marked by its base-level perception for the rest of your life.

The wild night of partying leads to a harrowing adventure as John and Dave first have to escape from the cops, and then get grabbed up by a wannabe-gangster named "Shitload" (Jonny Weston ) who's also a host for a parasitic alien species trying to conquer the Earth (he's full of a "shitload of bugs"). Along the way they fight a meat monster, escape angry ghosts, invade an alternate dimension, and kill a monster-cum-supercomputer. It's a lot, and this is what John and Dave do as their primary occupation now.

The original novel started as just a series of short stories that author David Wong wrote on his site. The stories meandered, had a lot of diversions and digressions, and basically just kind of wandered for a while until some kind of ending was reached. Hell, the whole of the book is broken up into five different stories: two main "books", an intro story, and outro story, and a framing device that kind of ties it all together. Some of this makes its way into the movie, but a lot of it is streamlined and ironed out to, of course, create a cohesive film.

I'm actually okay with a fair bit of this streamlining as trying to film all of the book would have led to a three hour film that no one, other than hardcore fans of the book, would have wanted to read. It's entirely possible that the team behind this film was planning to film the rest of the book (and possibly the sequels) if this first film had been successful, but with only a $141,000 take on a $1 Mil budget, that didn't really happen. I'm sure much of that was due to the movie just being so very weird, but there were some flaws with the way the novel adapts the book.

One big issue is that a huge part of the story, all revolving around Dave and who he really is (which I won't spoil here) was cut entirely out of the movie. The end section of that part of the book was stitched on to the first two-thirds of the first part of the book, creating this really weird shift in story that doesn't quite work. There ends up being two different villains who have barely any relation to each other, and the film just switches from one to the other without any cohesion or, really, reason for any of it.

These edits to the story end up pairing down a lot of the story about Dave, but it also removes some of the best actual horror of the book. There's a third character that's hinted at in the story that somehow is erased "from all past and future existence" by the evil demons that John and Dave have to fight, and that leads to some truly scary revelations about the story told. That's all missing here, and it dampens the horror. What's left is something more akin to a horror-comedy in the vein (no pun intended) of a light-hearted Evil Dead: gory but not at all scary.

What does make it into the film is pretty good. The movie retains a lot of the humor from the novel, getting many of the same laughs and managing to make them funny again. That said, while the movie doesn't adapt everything, what it brings in is carried over with total fidelity to the source material. The movie doesn't try to do anything new, or original, so all the jokes here play because they played in the book. Everything funny or wild or totally out-there bat-shit insane is because it was in the book. While I appreciate what they tried to bring in a little extra that was fresh and new wouldn't have been out of the question.

It's weird because I'm a little put off both by the fact that the movie trims out so much of the book but is also too true to the source material in the process. If they wanted to change stuff they should have just changed it, otherwise they needed to adapt the source material in a better way, sticking maybe to the first half of the book and saving the back half, and all its revelations, for a different film. It does neither, and both, and ends up a little mangled for it.

I like the movie for what it is but I have to admit it's not great. Which that leads me back to my original point: John Dies at the End it probably unfilmable, at least as a movie. It's too long, too meandering, too weird to work as a single film. Maybe as an HBO mini-series it could work, some place where all the gore and sex and violence could be carried out but also still get the full span and length of the story told properly. A film just isn't the right medium as too many compromises have to be made to get something with the name out on screen.

I don't want to completely shit on this film as it is a plucky little movie that does the best it can with what it has. But it is a low-budget film that looks every bit the $1 Mil budget it had, and that's not a good thing. It probably had to be super low-budget and made off-off-off Hollywood just so it could get made at all; no proper studio would likely touch this novel with a 10 foot pole. What's here doesn't live up to the book but maybe, if it was late and you hadn't read the novel and you see the title you might give it a whirl. In that context, John Dies at the End will probably entertain you, and that's really all it needs to do.