John Dies at the End

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.

I knew that Coscarelli wasn't going to be able to adapt every twist and turn that the (excellent) novel contains, so that prepared me for the fact that a good third of the books had to be cut for the film. Still, for a low budget camp-fest, this was a fun and entertaining adaptation. The casting of John and Dave was spot-on, and the mix of bizarro horror and sardonic wit was very much in keeping with the books style. My only major complaint, aide from the expected lack of polish that comes with a low-budget flick like this, is the way they handled Amy's character. One of my favorite characters in the series, Amy gets totally lost in the translation from book to film. The actress looks bored and mildly confused, and loses all of Amy's charm and pathos. :( I was really looking forward to seeing her character come to life, and I was disappointed to see that she might as well have been cut altogether. Oh well. Still, this is a worthwhile watch for fans of the book or Coscarelli aficionados, and despite my minor disappointments I'd still recommend it!

While I see lots of comments that it's not as good as the book I must make the comment that David Womg did write the screenplay so it was up to him to butcher his own work if he wanted to. The plot was interesting with a good mix of horror and sci-fi but more horror then anything else. The characters were somewhat flat but I didn't expect much. Did have its Sam Raime cinematography at times and felt Evil Deadish. Overall I liked it but was playing on my tablet most of the movie but I do that all the time