Crew
Director/Screenplay/Production Design – Joe Begos, Producers – Joe Begos, Matt Mercer, Josh Russell & Sierra Seance, Photography – Brian Sowell & Mike Testin, Music – Steve Moore, Makeup & Creature Effects – Russell FX. Production Company – Channel 83.
Cast
Joe Begos (Jimmy Lang), Matt Mercer (Stiggs Randolph), James Russo (John Redgrave)
Plot
Jimmy Lang calls his estranged best friend Stiggs Randolph over to his house. Jimmy claims that aliens have invaded the house. Jimmy has been consuming vast amounts of alcohol and drugs. He insists that Stiggs break several months of sobriety and consume alcohol so that he can see the aliens too. Stiggs discovers the body of an alien in the apartment. However, the alien will not stay dead and keep coming back to life, as other aliens arrive. Jimmy and Stiggs are forced to fight them off, while having to consume more and more drugs and alcohol.
Director Joe Begos first appeared with the alien abduction film Almost Human (2013), followed by the psychic powers film The Mind’s Eye (2015). I didn’t notice what a sensational director Begos had become until I watched his third film Bliss (2019), wherein Begos and actress Dora Madison gave their everything in an uncompromising work about a drug trip gone wrong. Begoes went on to make VFW (2019) with war veterans fighting off crazed drug addicts and Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022).
Jimmy and Stiggs was shot in 2020 during the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, although it took some time later to be completed. Bgeos used his own home as the sole location and plays the main character of Jimmy. For such a low-key film, Begos has attracted director Eli Roth and Nicholas McCarthy, director of The Pact (2012) and other horror films, as executive producers, while another director Jason Eisener of Hobo with a Shotgun (2011) fame, turns up as one of the interviewees on the video.
With Jimmy and Stiggs, Begos was clearly building on what he did in Bliss, a deranged film that jumped in right along with artist Dora Madison as she went on a drug trip and Begos wound everything up to full-on degrees of madness. Begos heads back to the same territory here. If Bliss was at around a nine on the dial then Jimmy and Stiggs winds it up to about twenty-five – and doesn’t let’s up for the entire 79-minute running time.
Begos lets go with fairly much everything in his arsenal – and when you are talking what would have been available during lockdown, that is quite impressive. The opening seven minutes of the film, for instance, are shot in first-person POV ie. where the camera takes the Begos’s character’s viewpoint and drifts through the house with him consuming enough drugs to kill a horse and then as he is levitated and floats up around ceiling level. The film does leave you with the worrying question of just how much in the way of drugs and alcohol Joe Begos regularly consumes and/or was doing during lockdown and the making of the film, but hey I don’t pass judgement on people’s consumption habits.
The fights with the aliens are hilarious. Begos and to a lesser extent Matt Mercer get into with a brutality that approaches lunacy with them beating, battering and body slamming the aliens. Of course, the aliens keep on coming and don’t stop even when they have their heads split open. Whole rooms and Begos and Mercer’s bodies become covered in what looks like the entire contents of an iridescent DayGlo paint factory representing the alien blood. And Begos just keeps on going and going with everything at an insane fever pitch.
Trailer here