John Dies at the End

2013 • 99 minutes

About this movie

It's all about the Soy Sauce, a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs.

Ratings and reviews

It's like someone read the book with that sort of half assed attention. The kind where your body and brain are doing the physical acts of reading but committing very little of the words to memory. Then decided to make a movie using the story that they vaguely remember. Writing down a very loose synopsis and a few key events, but completely unsure how they all relate to each other. This has to be the worst book to movie adaptation ever. There were changes made that were completely unjustified or explained in the story. The timeline is all out of whack, the motivation of all the characters is absent, not to mention every important part of the story is gone. If you didn't read the book none of it makes sense and even if you did the movie still doesn't make much sense.

The scenes faithfully recreated from the book were fine, the film adaptation just fell flat as it abandoned a huge partion of the book (a good 200 pages!). Amy as a throw away character? No "Monster Dave", and not one mention of "Undisclosed" was heartbreaking. Read the book (serously, monster Dave!), then watch the trailer (it's definitely the sizzle reel), if you decide to pay money to view the film...be honest with yourself about setting expectations. Definitely read the book though.

I'm not sure why they thought they could turn this 400 page book into a movie. They've removed over half of the book and what they kept wasn't well done at all. The author is very witty and descriptive in the book. However, the movie lacks almost all of that. The voiced-over internal monologue is flat and almost entirely devoid of entertainment value. It's a good effort that unfortunately falls completely flat. Just read the book instead.