Starring Joe Begos, Matt Mercer and Riley Dandy
Written and directed by Joe Begos
The Horror Section
“Fuck you, you fucking dumb alien fucks!” is both a typical bit of dialogue and something of a thesis statement for Joe Begos’ (Christmas Bloody Christmas) latest cinematic bender, JIMMY AND STIGGS. A COVID passion project shot entirely at the director’s apartment, with a rotating crew of four, this jittery, all-in-one-night gorefest turned into a four-year side quest that producer Josh Ethier told Nightmare on Film Street forced Begos to “live in a haunted house attraction.” The experience is like that too – enjoyably raucous, with cool, creative, visually striking elements throughout – but one-dimensional once you settle in. The curse of the critic is watching midnight movies like this at home instead of with a noisy crowd where they’re most likely to shine. Nevertheless, if spending an evening tweaking at a Monster Mini Golf designed by Rob Zombie sounds like fun, this movie is for you.
Structurally, JIMMY AND STIGGS is a coked-up, dayglo-and-neon Bad Taste riff on alien abduction by way of William Friedkin’s Bug and Begos’ own Bliss. The plot, such as it is, is this: Jimmy (Begos) is a frustrated director on a downward spiral. As he snorts and glugs his way through another night of porn and takeout in front of a Cannibal Holocaust poster, the lights begin to flicker, and classic little green men (though these are more silvery-black) appear to take him away. Not one to take these things lying down, Jimmy calls his estranged buddy, Stiggs (Matt Mercer), for backup and vows to “kill every one of the fuckers.” Armed with a chainsaw, a shotgun, a hammer and a seemingly endless supply of drugs and booze, the two men trapped in the apartment fight for their lives.
The film’s greatest flaw (besides a Tarantino-esque F-bomb problem) is in the thin emotional core on which this lovingly crafted effects freakout hangs its hat. The distance between Jimmy and Stiggs is a byproduct of the addictions they share now that Stiggs has gotten sober. The two couldn’t be in more different places (at least for the first five minutes of shared screentime) before Stiggs immediately falls off the wagon, kneecapping the dramatic tension. With Jimmy cranking it up to eleven from the start and Stiggs not far behind, the story has very little room to develop, stunting the thematic potential of the film and making the pacing jerky. Whereas Bliss struck a balance between humor and genuine drama by showing its protagonist’s downward spiral in full, that grounding is missing, leaving the boys to spin their wheels. For a movie that’s more about punching melonheads in the face than anything else, this thinness still shows through under the pink paint, even at 80 minutes, in part because the two are presented as somewhat dramatic characters a la Bliss rather than purely comic ones a la Tucker and Dale vs. Evil or Evil Dead II.
Still, throughout its four-year production, Begos and company had time to experiment, and the alien scenes, freed from this dramatic problem, are good old-fashioned goopy fun for the right kind of viewer – the kind who wants to see some heads explode. The pepto-soaked (and I mean soaked) third act is full of trippy surprises, and the whole flick has that good-humored DIY feel that characterizes the director’s work. “What do you want from me?” Jimmy asks Stiggs at one point, “I like to sensationalize! I like to hyperbolize!” Soon thereafter, Stiggs, doing his best Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, concedes the point. Gesturing over at an alien’s head and spinal cord dangling from the back of a door like a jacket, he flashes his buddy a manic grin: “You gotta admit, it’s pretty cool, right?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne3aSWSyAm8
