Jimmy And Stiggs

Bluesky

When I was in my early twenties, a few years after I moved out of my parents’ house, I decided to undertake a culinary experiment. What if I made a pasta dish but without the boring pasta and vegetable parts – just the cheese sauce and meat? Shortly after eating this, feeling queasy, I realised what those ‘boring’ ingredients were for. Jimmy And Stiggs is an experiment of a similar type. What if one were to strip out all the dull structural parts of a film, keeping plot and character development to a minimum, paying scant heed to logic, and use the resulting space to layer in extra action, fighting and ludicrous, over the top gore? To conduct the pasta experiment properly, one would really want a chef who excelled in the preparation of meat and cheese. For this cinematic experiment, one needs Joe Begos. He almost gets away with it.

As well as writing and directing, Begos plays lead character Jimmy, who is having a bad day. He was supposed to be going to dinner with his girlfriend (voiced by Riley Dandy), but she’s delayed, which means the restaurant will be overcrowded and miserable, so instead he starts drinking at home. He does a couple of lines of speed and settles down with a joint to watch some porn, and that might be that – just another boring night feeling glum about the filmmaking career which seems to have collapsed since he stopped hanging out with onetime best friend Stiggs (Matt Mercer) – but then there are earth tremors, or perhaps just something that feels like earth tremors, and before he knows it he’s suspended from the ceiling, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. The aliens are back.

Soon Jimmy is joined by Stiggs, whom he has apparently called to his aid, though he has no memory of it. It emerges that their separation happened in part because Stiggs has managed to stay sober for six months. Naturally, this is not the easiest situation in which to stay that way. When the two of them discover that it’s impossible to leave the apartment, they decide that their only hope lies in killing all of the aliens, using a gun, a machete, a broken bottle, a chainsaw or whatever comes to hand. Headbutting and biting also play a prominent role – but the aliens can take a lot of punishment, and as the situation develops, increasingly surreal events suggest that our heroes may be in much deeper trouble than they realised.

Gore-drenched films are increasingly common these days and can get a bit samey. Begos works around that problem by having the whole set blacklit and displaying the various bodily fluids we see splashed around in bright, fluorescent colours. As these layer over one another, the film becomes increasingly garish and unnatural-looking, in keeping with Jimmy’s ever more inebriated state and loss of touch with reality. The whole thing could be interpreted as a tragic tale of one man losing it and dragging his vulnerable friend into his madness, but that awareness is never demanded of the viewer, and the pace is so manic, the action so intense, that it’s easy to be fully immersed in Jimmy’s experience.

At the outset of the film – following a couple of wonderful fake trailers, the first of which might well be considered unmissable – the action is shot directly from Jimmy’s perspective as he wanders around his flat. Begos wisely sets this aside for most of the film – it would quickly become exhausting – but returns to it later for some fun Doom-style shots with that chainsaw. It does of course take a lot of skill to pull off this level of apparent chaos, and Begos handles it well, from the choreography to the emotional arcs of the characters. Almost everything is done using in-camera effects, which add moments of hilarity during some of the fight scenes.

Jimmy And Stiggs is an exhausting film which pushes its audience to the limit. It may well leave you feeling queasy, no matter how much you love its ingredients. It’s unlikely to be something you feel up to watching frequently, but everybody has to try this sort of thing once, right? You may want to consume a few beers yourself in preparation, and you’ll probably enjoy it more if you watch with friends. It’s an experience, and even if you regret it, you won’t forget it.

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