John doesn’t die at the end of “John Dies at the End,” although maybe he dies in the middle and possibly more than once. That’s not a spoiler so much as a consumer advisory: This loopy slacker horror farce is so intent on playing with your head — and time, and space, and paranoid conspiracy theories — that it doesn’t care about making sense. Which doesn’t stop the film from being a pretty good bad time.

It’s a cult project all around, from its source (a Web serial-turned-novel by David Wong, a.k.a. writer Jason Pargin) to its filmmaker, B-movie horrormeister Don Coscarelli. Back in the 1970s, Coscarelli gave us “Phantasm,” a work of cut-rate drive-in surrealism, and he followed that up with 2002’s “Bubba-Ho-Tep,” in which an aging Elvis Presley battles an Egyptian mummy in a nursing home. Coscarelli is, to put it mildly, an original.