John Dies at the End

Directed by Don Coscarelli

(R)

**

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This uneven horror-comedy “lives in a frisky otherworld of willful incoherence all its own,” said Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. Full of “offbeat witticisms, cheese-ball effects,” and “enjoyably deadpan performances,” it’s a hoot until it loses faith in the value of pure zaniness. As a young slacker (Chase Williamson) sits with a reporter (Paul Giamatti) to talk about the experiences that he and a friend had with a street drug called “soy sauce,” there are initially some good laughs and jolts from a flying moustache, a drug-addled dog, and a monster made of meat. But “when you’re having great fun at a movie and suddenly you’re not, where’s the fun?” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. John falls apart when it finally attempts “a stab at narrative logic” by taking seriously the battle that the two addicts have been waging against extra-dimensional alien invaders. Still, if you’re the kind of movie fan who eats up tripped-out wannabe cult films, give this one a look, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. It nicely balances “humor, horror, and an underlay of genuine sweetness.”