Studio:   The Horror Section
Director: Joe Begos
Writer:   Joe Begos
Producer: Joe Begos, Josh Ethier, Matt Mercer, Josh Russell, Sierra Spence
Stars:    Joe Begos, Matt Mercer, Riley Dandy, Josh Ethier, James Russo

Review Score:

Summary:

Estranged friends have their relationship tested even further when they’re attacked by aliens during a booze-fueled bender.

Synopsis:

With his career in a downslide, struggling filmmaker Jimmy Lang settles in for a night of drugs and alcohol while waiting for his date to arrive at his apartment. Following a series of flickering lights and strange quakes, Jimmy sees alien figures as he is suddenly paralyzed and levitated before blacking out.

When he recovers, Jimmy discovers he lost several hours of time, which caused him to miss his expected guest. Feeling an implant in his head and finding orange alien blood around his apartment, Jimmy likens his experience to that of John Redgrave, whom Jimmy remembers from a TV special on alien abductions.

Worried that the aliens will return as nightfall approaches, Jimmy calls his estranged friend Stiggs Randolph, who comes to the apartment. Finding Jimmy armed with a shotgun and ranting about aliens, Stiggs tries talking sense into Jimmy, which only causes a physical altercation between the two of them.

Lights begin flickering again. Stiggs discovers the apartment’s door and windows are inexplicably blocked by brick walls. During a sudden electrical blackout, Stiggs vanishes. Jimmy ends up killing three aliens during a series of violent attacks.

Stiggs reappears with a hurt jaw and missing memories. Unsure if aliens abducted his friend or if Stiggs is now one of them, Jimmy forces Stiggs to swig scotch, which he discovered repels the aliens, to prove his identity. Seeing they are in the same situation, Jimmy and Stiggs plot to kill any additional aliens that try abducting them again.

Jimmy and Stiggs become separated by a door that mysteriously locks. While Stiggs deals with a revived alien whose head Jimmy impaled with a bottle, Jimmy is drawn into a room playing a video on a TV. Jimmy sees that the video is dated two days in the future and features police interrogating him regarding Stiggs’s death, which Jimmy insists was caused by aliens.

After defeating his attacker, Stiggs uses his shoulder to break down the door. Stiggs sees Jimmy being attacked by an alien using tentacles to ensnare Jimmy’s entire body.

Jimmy wakes up in the apartment missing another three hours. Stiggs claims Jimmy was abducted again, adding that he has been fending off more alien attacks in the meantime. Jimmy becomes suspicious of Stiggs’s happy demeanor, which Stiggs attributes to doing drugs and drinking alcohol during the melees. Stiggs recounts how he killed various aliens as he shows Jimmy their gruesome remains throughout the apartment.

Jimmy finds printed screenshots of the police interrogation video. He then confesses to Stiggs that they are from the future, when Jimmy will be accused of murdering Stiggs.

Their growing paranoia and suspicion of each other sparks a violent fight between Jimmy and Stiggs. Their struggle stops when the implant in Stiggs’s head starts bulging. Stiggs collapses after trying to cut the implant out of his face with a broken bottle.

Possessed by an alien entity, Stiggs attacks Jimmy once again. Jimmy eventually drops Stiggs to the floor where Stiggs’s body splits in two, releasing a lobster-like creature.

Jimmy crawls to the bathroom to escape the creature. Using pliers, Jimmy painfully pulls the implant out of his own head to avoid suffering the same fate as Stiggs. He then falls unconscious.

Jimmy recovers aboard an alien spacecraft where Stiggs’s body is on an exam table, and his head is in a cylinder of bubbling fluid. Armed with a chainsaw, Jimmy kills several astronauts who attack him. Determined to not let the aliens get him, Jimmy begins sawing off his limbs until he eventually saws his entire body in half.

Review:

Joe Begos movies are unmistakable. The indie filmmaker has as much of a signature style as anyone who has ever worked in horror, with his telltale texture distinguished by a sensory overload of glowing neon colors, heavy metal noise, goopy fluids, and kooky characters who come from glamorized gutters of booze and blow. Consistently carrying on this commitment to celebrating the lo-fi side of blood-spattered cinema makes Begos admirable as a filmmaking rebel, though it’s also what makes his movies an increasingly harder sell as his filmography grows.

You know you’re in a Joe Begos joint as soon as “Jimmy and Stiggs” starts. Begos plays Jimmy, a not-too-far-from-reality filmmaker who takes phone calls from a girlfriend and then an agent that establish him as unreliable and unemployable. Jimmy copes by swigging directly from a scotch bottle. When that fails to do the trick, he snorts some coke, then peeps a clip of vintage porn on TV while blazing a blunt.

Viewers join Jimmy through a first-person camera simulating his perspective for this segment, complete with distracting flashes of black meant to be eyeblinks. This vicarious sense of being high turns to being horrified when lights begin flashing, Jimmy begins levitating, and aliens enter for an apparent abduction.

Unsettled by the experience, Jimmy recovers to find several hours missing, much like a man he remembers from an old alien abduction special on TV. Just like that man, Jimmy feels like something has been implanted in his head. Bright orange blood can also be found all over his apartment. Certain that the aliens are going to come back to probe him again, Jimmy calls the only person who might possibly believe his crazy claim, maybe even help: his estranged friend Stiggs.

The projects on Joe Begos’s résumé can usually be traced to 1980s influences. The telekinetic thrills in “The Mind’s Eye” (review here) are an undisguised homage to David Cronenberg’s “Scanners.” “VFW” (review here) calls back to John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” among other titles in the “siege” subgenre.

Perhaps unintentionally, the fractured friendship at the setup’s center, and the ensuing chaos confined to the single location of Jimmy’s Los Angeles apartment, make “Jimmy and Stiggs” play like Begos’s take on a buddy/hangout film, albeit one that pulses with nonstop mayhem more than it pauses for taking another toke together. However, the premise of two pals fending off a small-scale extraterrestrial attack is exactly that, a premise, not a full plot. It's reductive, yet not inaccurate, to describe the movie as two grown men excessively arguing in between bouts of wrestling with alien puppets. The repetitive nature of recycling these same beats again and again, just changing the amount of gunk poured over proceedings, ends up making the action more exhausting than exhilarating.

Bigger than that though, “Jimmy and Stiggs” seems like a step backwards for Begos. Of course, it’s never easy for lesser-known names to find financing, even when they’re relatively established in some circles with 10+ years of feature filmmaking under their belt. But after working with larger casts, sets, and scope on something like “Christmas Bloody Christmas” (review here), scaling down to the DIY aesthetic of two guys in a room feels reasonable for a first-timer, not someone whose career should be expanding instead of shrinking.

With the film itself running only 77 minutes, Eli Roth’s distribution company, The Horror Section, pads “Jimmy and Stiggs” with a pair of Coming Attractions. “The Piano Killer” is an overlong gag about a piano that crushes people, Looney Tunes-style. “Don’t Go in That House, B*tch” is another overlong gag, this time about people unwisely opening a door, encountering something bizarre, then freezing on the title as a punchline. The production value is pretty good here, but at only four minutes total, the triteness pales in comparison to what Eli Roth and others did for the same section of “Grindhouse” in 2007. This release wraps up after end credits with a seven-minute tour of the set/apartment where “Jimmy and Stiggs” was shot, highlighting the production as a “handmade” horror movie.

Like every Begos effort before it, “Jimmy and Stiggs” remains an acquired taste, with some perhaps finding their tongues tired from the same flavors of highlighter-quality hues, gore geysers, and Steve Moore synth scores. Saying anything stronger would be out of the question though. Joe Begos is clearly a good-hearted guy who simply loves movies, loves making movies, and loves making those movies with his friends. Yet when you’re not part of that inner circle, it’s difficult to get into a recurring groove that can feel like an outdated inside joke only his closest friends and fans still routinely vibe with.

Review Score: 45