Considered starting a thread about this a few days ago. It could definitely go either way, but i’ll see it.
i loved Bubba Ho-Tep
Also based off of a book by a regular Cracked.com writer. I’ve been interested in reading it for a while.
—DiB
Yeah, I’ve had the book sitting on my shelf for a couple of years now. Still haven’t read it yet though. I’ll lend you it, Polaris.
I wanted to like Bubba Ho-Tep better than I did. Still a great concept. This looks promising.
They had me at “from the creator of Phantasm and Bubba Ho Tep.”
Yeah, I’m gonna see it but I agree, Coscarelli is very hit and miss so it could be really great and out there or horrible.
GIamatti is a huge supporter of Coscarelli. He wants to play Colonel Parker in Bubba Nosferatu and has been trying hard to get funding for the film, but even since Campbell dropped out—asshole!!!—there has been little movement.
i’d love to see it happen.
wonder if that Phantasm remake is still going ahead.
“I’ll lend you it, Polaris.”
Heh, depending on the shipping, it could possibly be cheaper for me to buy a copy! But thanks anyway!
—PolarisDiB
Nice to see Cracked mentioned, always liked it over Mad
I also really appreciated and enjoyed Bubba Ho-Tep, and I have a soft spot for The Beastmaster, though I haven’t seen it in years (though someone I know and trust in the matters says it holds up). And you mention Giamatti, but this also has Clancy Brown, which is a plus in my mind.
If you click on the ellipses beneath the trailer in the original post, it links to the amusing Cracked/author’s description of the book. While I always preferred Mad over Cracked, the latter has done a much better job of making an internet presence and identity for itself than the former.
did not know Cracked had an internet presence (have not read in well over a decade) thanks for the tip, gonna look that up right now.
“Heh, depending on the shipping, it could possibly be cheaper for me to buy a copy! But thanks anyway!
"
Just pulled it off the shelf. One of those book sale purchases for $1 that linger on the shelf since it looks a little iffy and not willing to take a chance on it unless I get some recommendations. Actually, my copy comes with the press release that features Don Coscarelli: “Wong is like a mash-up of Douglass(sic) Adams and Stephen King – ‘page-turner’ is an understatement.” (OKay, now I’m even less willing to take a chance on this but looks promising as film material).
Dennis:
I’m just going to warn you, the Cracked website is a time sink. You enter it to read a list or two, five hours and thirty lists later you’re wondering how the hell they manage to find so many new ways of writing the same jokes about robots.
(I really like Cracked, but I’ve seen some Cracked hate on this site that I don’t entirely disagree with)
—PolarisDiB
I have always liked Slyvester better than Alfred, funnier covers. The one pagers jokes are funnier in Cracked. Mad still wins the movie parody wars, mostly I bought cracked over mad as a young man. I also bought Gorezone over Fangoria. Good magazines are hard to find these days.
Online Cracked is more like the Onion than Mad Mag, but much better than the Onion because it’s more fleshed out with links to fun research and doesn’t try to charge you if you visit the site more than ten times or whatever the hell the Onion is stupidly doing right now.
Anyway, Wong isn’t my favorite Cracked writer; that would be John Cheese. John Cheese is epic.
—PolarisDiB
A friend of mine caught this at Slamdance just recently and met the director after the screening. He said it was really good, although obviously too ambitious for its budget. I’ve only seen two other reviews—-one ‘professional’ review on slant, and a user review on imdb—and both were extremely negative.
here is the slant review:
John Dies at the End, writer-director Don Coscarelli’s adaptation of Jason Pargin’s oft-spastic but thoughtful novel by the same name, is supremely disappointing. Granted, the film’s source material is a hard narrative to adapt since most of its intelligence and appeal stems from its many absurd tangents. But Coscarelli took out so much of the plot from Pargin’s novel that he rendered its story totally incoherent.
The most salient omission on Coscarelli’s part is protagonist David Wong’s preoccupation with waking up and realizing that he’s literally not the same guy he was when he fell asleep. That fear is the crux of Pargin’s novel, a horror-comedy that riffs on one of H.P. Lovecraft’s thematic preoccupations: that the most frightening things are the ones we find hardest to accept are true. Without it, this fitfully funny mess is just exhausting.
In three different introductory scenes, David (Chase Williamson), a young guy thrust into ridiculous circumstances, tells us what the world of John Dies at the End is all about. None of these sequences make sense since none of them are contextualized by David’s normal, dreary routine working at a shitty minimum-wage job, as is explained in Pargin’s book. David and his friend John’s (Rob Mayes) lives have been violently upended after they start taking a mysterious drug called the Soy Sauce, a living substance that allows anyone who ingests it to see and perceive things that normal people can’t. It’s also a gateway to another dimension. So when David starts to inadvertently take it, things start to get weird and it’s all thanks to an evil deity called Korrok, a Jamaican magician cum dealer named Robert Marley, and other playfully juvenile monsters.
In Coscarelli’s reprehensibly lazy adaptation, much of which is copied note-for-note from Pargin’s book, shit happens at a furious pace, and almost none of it is adequately explained. The handful of moments where Coscarelli tentatively tries to explain events are haphazardly thrown into the plot’s mix for added disorientation, like the film’s cryptic opening scene. In this sequence, David poses a riddle about whether or not an axe used to behead a zombie is in fact the same axe it originally was after having its axe-head and handle replaced. It’s a striking question that gets to the heart of Pargin’s novel: Are you yourself even when you’re not the person you thought you were? The plot points and narration needed to get that point across are totally absent from Coscarelli’s film, making one wonder if he was even trying to faithfully adapt Pargin’s book in the first place
A Jamaican cum dealer? Eww…
It sounds like the reviewer’s just mad about discrepancies between the book and the movie, so that’s annoying that that’s the only thing he can talk about. I’m pretty excited for this – I’m gonna try as hard as I can to get back into the mindset of a college freshman and go see this at a theater!
I find it interesting that the reviewer both criticizes Coscarelli for taking out too much plot and for copying it note-for-note. Granted it is possible to both be unfaithful (to the spirit) and faithful (to the text), but I think Drunken Father Figure of Old seems right and this is an example of “the book is better” rather than a review of the movie as a movie. I, too, remain eager to see this.
a Smith
The trailer for the new Don Coscarelli movie John Dies at the End (not yet listed here, reportedly being released sometime in 2012) is online. Though not a big fan of horror in general, I found my immediate reaction was to be very excited about seeing this. I don’t know, it looks like it could be pretty awful—perhaps even more probably than being good, though I am hopeful—but I still am attracted. Anyone else have thoughts?
the trailer:
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