John Dies at the End 2013

A.O. Scott, New York Times: It zigs, zags and trips over its own feet and on its own home-brewed hallucinogens. It's a ridiculous, preposterous, sometimes maddening experience, but also kind of a blast. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: When you're having great fun at a movie and suddenly you're not, where's the fun? Read more

Tom Keogh, Seattle Times: [It] eventually finds its own rhythm and meaningful chaos. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: John Dies At The End sometimes strains to live up to its midnight-movie reputation, but not every B-horror picture combines demonic creatures and ultra-violence with musings about what it means to be alive in a world that's getting more unreal by the day. Read more

Nathan Rabin, AV Club: It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: "John Dies at the End" dies closer to the beginning, before writer-director Don Coscarelli's adaptation of the book of the same name has reached minute 20. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Director Don Coscarelli isn't especially smooth or coherent, and he leans on weird for weird's sake. Read more

William Goss, Film.com: Coscarelli's direction seems well-suited to the free-wheeling material, bringing a critically light touch to a story with apocalyptic stakes. Read more

John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter: Horror-comedy from Phantasm director starts with a bang but quickly loses speed. Read more

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times: John lives in a frisky otherworld of willful incoherence all its own. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Despite its astronomical body count, John Dies at the End never takes itself too seriously, and neither should you. Read more

Scott Tobias, NPR: Once the colorful anecdotes sprawl out into an actual narrative, the film gets convoluted and loud, amplifying the weirdness without doing much to clarify it. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: A movie so brazenly off-kilter that I'm not entirely sure its title is even accurate. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: "John Dies at the End" thinks it's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for dudes. But in its randomness, its vulgarity and its level of humor, it's more like the collected writings on the walls of a roadside men's room. Read more

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Salvador Dali meets George Romero. Say hello. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: It's one of those films that might as well be announced with the words "cult classic" emblazoned on the marquee. It's an interesting failure that's almost worth seeing for that reason alone. Kind of. Not really. Read more

Charlie Schmidlin, Chicago Sun-Times: What Coscarelli's achieved doesn't feel like an adaptation. It feels more like he seems he skimmed the source material, burned it, and then assembled a vague recollection on film after three days of untold indulgences. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: It's the ultimate in spoiler titles. And this stoner Ghostbusters, an altered state disguised as a movie, may also add up to a hot cult item if silliness doesn't sabotage the scares Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: What may be the most freewheeling and imaginative film of Coscarelli's checkered career, loaded with tripped-out mood and nicely balanced between humor, horror and an underlay of genuine sweetness. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Nobody cares about John. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: John Dies at the End is joyously heterodox in its method, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melange of sci-fi, black comedy, and action, with disquieting body-horror sight gags that at times recall David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: How can a single movie contain all this awesome craziness? Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: As with most fantasy films, the story is secondary to inventive images and speculative ideas. And more than most, this one adheres to its own logic in ways that are continually entertaining. Read more

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: A shaggy-dog story with restless leg syndrome. Read more

Keith Uhlich, Time Out: The "wackiness" (scare quotes included) is mostly ceaseless and tiresome, from the ravenous zombie neo-Nazi that leads things off to the Galaxy Quest rejects that figure in the movie's annoyingly anticlimactic finale. Read more

Rob Nelson, Variety: Give or take the titular disclosure, John Dies at the End is a thoroughly unpredictable horror-comedy -- and an immensely entertaining one, too. Read more

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice: John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old -- and, oh, it is terrible. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: I stopped taking notes when the woman disintegrated into a ball of writhing snakes. Read more