Tag Archives: Drug abuse

150. JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012)

July 31, 2013 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 5 Comments

“The name grabbed me instantly, but when I read the log line about a street drug called ‘soy sauce’ and a pair of mid-west slackers battling a silent otherworldly invasion, I was hooked. Since my youth I’ve had a rabid interest in the sci-fi, horror and fantasy genres. Many of my previous films have explored the surreal and strange. What I love about JOHN DIES AT THE END is that in addition to being hide-under-the-bed scary, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny.”–Don Coscarelli, director’s statement

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DIRECTED BY: Don Coscarelli

FEATURING: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti, Fabianne Therese, Clancy Brown, Glynn Turman, Doug Jones

PLOT: A college dropout named David Wong tells a story to a journalist at a Chinese restaurant while under the influence of a drug called “soy sauce.” He reveals that the sauce has given him and his friend John psychic powers that enable them to see inter-dimensional intruders who are bent on conquering our reality. He then relates the story of how, together with his one-handed girlfriend and her dog, he and John traveled to the alternate dimension to thwart the invasion.
Still from John Dies at the End (2012)
BACKGROUND:

John Dies at the End was adapted from a comic novel of the same name. The name of the story’s protagonist and the author are both “David Wong,” which is actually a pseudonym for Jason Pargin. “John Dies” began life as a short story posted on Pargin’s blog.
Don Coscarelli had been working on a sequel to his previous feature, Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), with Paul Giamatti, but funding fell through. Giamatti supported the idea of adapting John Dies at the End instead, and served as executive producer on the substitute project.
Coscarelli credits Amazon’s recommendation algorithm with suggesting the novel “John Dies to the End” to him.
The movie’s prologue is a modern zombie-based variation on an ancient philosophical paradox called “the ship of Theseus” (in the book, the prologue refers to an ending that is not explicitly present in the movie).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We can’t actually mention the movie’s most memorable image here, both thanks to the fact that it’s obscene, and that doing so would spoil what may be the movie’s best joke. Those who’ve seen the film already, however, will doubtlessly remember the door that “cannot be opened.”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Jason Pargin wrote a sprawling comedy novel in part about two party-hearty college dropouts who take a mysterious drug nicknamed “soy sauce” that makes them clairvoyant, enabling them to perceive an invasion by demonic forces from another dimension. Don Coscarelli, the writer/director of Bubba Ho-Tep and the Phantasm series, took note of this literary property and decided to adapt it, chopping up the timeline and adding hallucinatory demonic visuals until the result plays out like a bad trip brought on by shooting up way too much of an experimental psychedelic drug.

Original trailer for John Dies at the End

COMMENTS: Here’s an unexpected spoiler for you: John doesn’t die at the end of John Dies at the End. At least, I don’t think he does. But it may Continue reading 150. JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012) →

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CAPSULE: SPRING BREAKERS (2012)

April 10, 2013 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 5 Comments

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DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine

FEATURING: Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, James Franco, Rachel Korine, Selena Gomez

PLOT: Four college girls head to Fort Lauderdale for a week of binge drinking, drugs and sex and wind up teaming up with a local gangster for a crime spree.

Still from Spring Breakers (2012)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It isn’t in the same league of weirdness as the other two Korine movies that have already made the List, although in many ways the deliriously debauched Spring Breakers is this director’s best film.

COMMENTS: Making an arthouse movie that critiques American trash culture starring a cast of gun-toting barely legal starlets in bikinis is a tall order. With Spring Breakers, Harmont Korine is shooting for something like a topless La Dolce Vita for the rave set, but it ends up more along the lines of “Girls Gone Wild” on acid. Not that that’s a bad thing; far from it. Spring Breakers isn’t profound as satire or anything—you mean these blunt-huffing sluts aren’t good role models for today’s suburban youth?—and the plot’s about as substantial as a string bikini, but the glitzy neon visuals and impressionistic narrative style synergize to create a uniquely American nightmare of trippy titillation and regret. Unannounced flashbacks, narrated montages and drug-trip sequences (there’s a nice pixelation effect where the image shifts unpredictably as Selena Gomez smokes a joint) disorient the casual viewer looking for nothing more than T&A. Add in a grungy gonzo performance by James Franco as Alien, an arrogant small-time dope and gun seller with pretensions of rap greatness, and you have an entertaining, if messy, trip through the dark side of contemporary collegiate consciousness. In Trash Humpers, Korine manifested the nihilism of the humpers’ lives through their horrid wrinkly rubber masks and glitchy low-tech videography, but here he focuses his camera on the improbably gorgeous; it’s all bikini crotch shots with arty lighting and Dutch angles. Despite all the beautiful bodies, the director’s trademark amateur grotesques also show up, in the form of a pair of scabby-looking thug brothers (the real-life “Atlanta twins,” inexplicable local mini-celebrities). With his trash tattoos (pot leaf on the back of his hand, dollar sign on his neck), grill of gold teeth, and cornrows, Franco’s scummy Alien looks like a typical Korine creation, too. You can almost smell the mix of b.o., reefer smoke and cheap cologne rising off him. Alien gets the best lines; his speech about how he’s living the American dream encompasses the film’s entire social agenda (plus he has Scarface running on an endless loop in his bedroom). The film’s maddest moment occurs as Alien sits at his beachside grand piano surrounded by the bikinied breakers in pink ski masks and croons a Britney Spears ballad that segues into a crime spree music video. Potty-mouthed hotties, psychologically sadistic threesomes, a vast variety of bongs (including one shaped like a baby), a magical bikini massacre and reams of general debauchery round out the shock action. Korine has previously worked almost entirely in anecdotes, and it’s nice to see him challenge himself with an attempt at a semi-coherent full-length narrative, even if he doesn’t quite have a grasp on how to tell a story (or, to be fair, much interest in telling one). The action is nonsensical; character development is nonexistent. The bad girls start and end the movie as bad girls, the good girls start and end as good girls. Really, Spring Breakers is a portrait of a mindset—the idolatry of ecstasy-popping suburban white kids towards the ideal of amoral freedom embodied by the hip hop gangster—but the drift towards more conventional storytelling suits the director. For all its faults, the movie works because Harmony Korine finally embraces the fact that he is at heart an exploitation movie director working with an arthouse movie toolkit, not the other way around.

In promoting the film, Korine conducted a bizarre, typo-laden “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on Reddit. Among his pithy gems was this response to the question “is Harmony short for Harmonica?”: “yo mommaica.” BTW, Spring Breakers perv scorecard goes like this: Gomez keeps her swimsuit on, Hudgens and Benson are briefly seen nude underwater, and the director’s wife goes all out, appearing in a shower scene and having cocaine snorted off her torso. Extras provide plenty of boob flashage to fill out the sleaze quotient.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a weird, day-glo fusion of trashy exploitation thriller and arthouse pretension, enlivened by game performances from a trio of former squeaky-clean TV stars and a deliriously brilliant turn from James Franco.”–Matthew Turner, View London (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: WEIRDSVILLE (2007)

February 12, 2013 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) Leave a comment

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DIRECTED BY: Allan Moyle

FEATURING: Scott Speedman, Wes Bentley, Greg Bryk, Maggie Castle, Taryn Manning, Jordan Prentice

PLOT: Two junkies, who are planning a heist to pay off a mobster, clash with Satanists when they interrupt a ritual while burying an overdosed friend.

Still from Weirdsville (2007)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite sucking up to us by putting “weird” right there in the title, Weirdsville isn’t strange enough to belong on a list of the weirdest movies of all time. There are a few very mild drug trip sequences, but the rest of the film never rises above the level of aggressively quirky.

COMMENTS: A stoned caper comedy starring two (relatively) lovable polydrug abusers, Weirdsville wants to be the second coming of The Big Lebowski. And while it’s great for a screenwriter to set his sights high, Weirdsville ultimately tries too hard, forcing the quirk; it’s still a fun ride, but it overplays its bid for classic status. Speedman (playing Dexter, the “quiet, introspective one”) and Bentley (as Royce, “the ideas man”—i.e. the village idiot) share a believable buddy chemistry, based on in-jokes and stories they’ve been repeating to each other in the endless lazy, hazy days since high school. No matter how much Royce annoys the more cerebral Dexter, he’s devoted to his drug-dazed pal, despite the fact that Royce’s blunders keep complicating the plot and frustrating his own plans to kick junk. (Despite being prominently billed, Taryn Manning’s part-time hooker Mattie is little more than a third wheel and a plot point).

The movie builds well for the first two acts. The twin storylines of drug debt owed to vicious mobster Omar and an accidental overdose that leads to an encounter with preppy Satanists entwine to create a desperate situation for our two unlikely heroes. This in turn leads to an ill-advised burglary, complicated when its interrupted by a teenage housesitter and by the constant pursuit of the duo by angry drug dealers and Satanists. So far, so good; Weirdsville is building a crazy tension, relieving it with bouts of goofy hipster dialogue and indie rock interludes, then ramping it up again.

But Weirdsville steps over the line from pleasantly quirky to desperate to be different with the introduction of a new character, a dwarf security guard. The judicious use of dwarfs is one of the most difficult calls for a director to make. On the one hand there’s a long and distinguished tradition of using dwarfs in comedy, dating all the way back to the days of medieval jesters. But putting a “little person” in an unexpected role—like a security guard—is by now almost a cliché, and the gambit risks looking gimmicky and exploitative. Here, the dwarf is not only a mall cop, but also a medieval re-enactor with a gang of chainmailed cronies who are all also of sub-average stature; for me, when these guys show up swinging mini-morningstars, the movie, which had been toying with greatness, jumps the quirky shark. It’s still fun right up to the end, but any shot at greatness has been botched. The most memorable bits go to the well-heeled, straight-edge Satanists, who end up whining “Lucifer is supposed to be helping us, not plaguing us with midgets and junkies!” That line pretty much sums up the movie; if Satanists plagued by midgets and junkies sounds like your kind of scene, you’ll probably enjoy Weirdsville.

Director Allan Moyle is best known for Pump Up the Volume (1990), a cult hit among 90s teens starring Christian Slater as a high school pirate radio operator.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Some of it is funny-weird, but too much is pointlessly weird.”–Stephen Farber, Hollywood Reporter (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Billy,” who argued that this “movie has zombies, drugs and midgets in it. Can’t get much weirder than that.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)