It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The movie starts very well, it continues very well, up to the half of it, then it all becomes monotonous and hard to follow. Absolutely blame on the script, because the actors are all excellent, Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Sally Field, Joanne Woodward, and, in smaller roles, Carl Reiner, Strother Martin, Robby Benson and Norman Fell. There are many fun scenes but, overall, the film is a failure, it's not easy at all to make a great comedy about death and suicide. Dom DeLuise is the most hilarious, the jokes about Polish people that his father told him are the funniest of the whole movie. One of the last roles for Myrna Loy and Pat O'Brien.

Undeterred by his largely mediocre directorial debut in Gator, Burt Reynolds once again plants his behind in the director's chair for The End, a dark comedy about terminal illness and death. As in the case of Gator, here we have a film which fails to fulfil its potential – sure, it rises to a few comic highlights and features a pretty good performance from Reynolds himself, but overall the film is tediously drawn-out and can't seem to make up its mind what it wants to be.Young, good-looking Wendell 'Sonny' Lawson (Burt Reynolds) learns that he has a toxic blood syndrome and will soon die. Taking the most negative estimates of his remaining life expectancy for fact, he believes he will be gone within three months. Sonny visits his young girlfriend (Sally Field) for one final tender interlude (or "a pity f@ck" as he phrases it); he visits his odd-couple parents, his ex-wife, his estranged daughter. He even attempts to attend a confession at church, only to end up seeing a novice priest who envies his hell-raising lifestyle rather than helping him to clear his conscience with God. Ultimately, Sonny decides to commit suicide… but his attempt to do so is unsuccessful and he ends up in a lunatic asylum where he befriends schizophrenic Marlon Borunki (Dom DeLuise). Marlon helps Sonny time and again to end his life, each attempt becoming more farcical and over-the-top than the one before. Could t be that Sonny doesn't really want to end his life after all? The first half of the movie is better than the second, with some philosophical black comedy concerning the preciousness of life and the inevitability of death. Several scenes are painfully unspooled during this first half, but at least in these early scenes the film seems to have a sense of its own morbid fascination. The second half descends into uneven and ill-fitting slapstick, with DeLuise mugging away madly as Reynolds' comrade-in-lunacy. DeLuise is OK in the role but the entire second section seems strangely unconnected to the first half, creating a jarring swing in mood and style from which the film never truly recovers. The notion that 'death is funny' as a cinematic theme is a strange beast which needs to be handled with an expert touch to have any chance of working. In this case, it nearly works but ultimately doesn't quite pull it off. The End is a near-miss… but a miss nonetheless.

Burt Reynolds throws himself in front of and behind the camera in this 1978 gem of a comedy. Not the best comedy that year, but far from the worse. Reynolds may have bit off more than he could chew by directing and acting all in one, but the final product was funny enough for cinemas. Still, without Dom DeLuise, this movie would be far from watchable. It is DeLuise that saves this movie. At sometimes dark, The End mixes mild comedy which delivers this Woody Allen (who wrote the original script) type story. DeLuise is nothing but brilliant as the lovable, yet crazy friend of Reynolds. This movie is nothing but fun. Not the best movie, but a nice story with an interesting cast of characters.

Funny in a dark sort of way. I like the ending, and Burt Reynolds is funny in a sick way. This film is dated, and looks very 70's. The material is older, but still has some laughs. I caught about a quarter of it, after not seeing it for 10 years, and found it ok, but it depend what mood I am in when I watch it. I would watch it again on TBS but probably chanel surf at the same time. 6/10