"You can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease..."

A lot of you mortals are sad this week. I understand.  To lose Angus Scrimm and David Bowie within days of each other must feel awful, but take heart. They're with me now. Everything's cool, I promise.

Plus, you can always enjoy their cinematic works over and over again. That's the beauty of movies -- they make people immortal, in sort of a cheesy ripoff way.

Bowie was in a horror film called The Hunger, which I couldn't find streaming within this movie blog's budget, though it is on Amazon Prime for a couple of bucks.  Let's just focus on Scrimm, shall we?

Lawrence Rory Guy was in a few movies, but it wasn't until he took the stage name Angus Scrimm and starred as 'The Tall Man' in Don Coscarelli's 1979 film Phantasm that he became a horror icon.

Phantasm is a great movie. Scrimm plays a shape-shifting alien who steals corpses from the cemetery to ship back to his home dimension. He has the assistance of some satanic jawas and a couple of silver balls that fly around and suck people's blood out of them. The good guys drive around in a cherry-ass Barracuda. Weird things happen. Stuff blows up. I'd love to review it for you, but I couldn't find it online.

So what's the next best thing? Scrimm appears in a handful of movies that stream on Amazon Prime for free, but none of them quite as good as John Dies At The End, which is on Netflix and Shudder.

And the best part? This 2012 film was also directed by Don Coscarelli, who wrote the screenplay adaption of the novel by David Wong.

I know there are those of you who are going to say the book was better, but was Angus Scrimm in the book? Only if your brain put him there!

Scrimm plays Father Shellnut, who, to be fair, is just an ancillary character.  Paul Giamatti is also in the movie as journalist Arnie Blondestone, who is also just an ancillary character.

The real stars of the story are Dave (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes), two slackers who are burdened with the job of fighting extra-dimensional monsters after taking a drug called "soy sauce" that causes them to slip in and out of time and space. I don't want to say too much more and give it away, but I will let slip that John actually dies in the middle. 

John Dies At The End rides the line of scary and trippy and funny in a most entertaining way. How funny is it? The only reason I can think of that it wasn't hailed as the Ghostbusters of its generation is it was just too damn weird to transcend its cult status. A werewolf once told me it's "a real mind-fuckler", so give it a look while you're still thinking about Angus.