Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Joe Begos
Starring: Joe Begos, Matt Mercer, Riley Dandy
Oh Christ, we're doing this again is it? Jimmy and Stiggs, ace visceral chamber-room-indie-body-horror, is preluded by two "coming attractions": a couple of those fake trailers for fictional horror films which people did two decades ago in the name of whatever "grindhouse" is/was. Put together by Eli Roth (who, by and large, I do like - both as a filmmaker and for services to horror) as cutesy promotion for his new studio The Horror Section, the shorts exemplify the stereotypes and expected tropes of the genre in cheerfully gratuitous fan service. The first one is quite amusing, featuring a killer whose gimmick is to crush victims with the unlikely instrument of a piano. I like the puns – "it's his way or the Steinway", "you're in deep treble" hahaha - but Mr Roth seems to have run out of steam with the second one, Don't Go in That House, Bitch!, which consists of people entering a residence to meet sticky ends while Trump supporter and apparent curling enthusiast Snoop Dogg simply intones the title over and over. It's the sort of thing which only a happy minded 14-year-old boy would truly find comical: a demographic that surely wouldn't be aware of the original mode which is being spoofed, anyway.
The trailers do Jimmy and Stiggs no favours, as it prompts the audience to question both the state of the genre and their own viewing choices. I love horror, we all do, but this line of content - this circumlocutory repetition of apparently recognisable conventions, the amplifying of already established excesses, a too eager nostalgia - just drains the soul. It foregrounds the moribund circumstances of the genre, the self-ghettoization into empty callbacks and groundless indulgence (see the V/H/S series). An unflattering framing for Jimmy and Stiggs, then, which is a horror film made for horror fans by horror people (it's the first release from Roth's aforementioned studio, god bless him).
Written, directed and starred by Joe Begos (he did Bliss, an earlier neon drenched drug text), we open with a Lady in the Lake style POV (another star/director triumph) of a fella in a dog eared apartment experiencing the throes of dependency: bringing burning joints and bottles of beer to the screen, tilting the camera for a couple of scant lines, pornography unspooling in the background as he paces the clutter alone, haranguing for company via his phone. Writing this morning with a mild hangover, the aforementioned situation is queasily familiar... (as was the cinema goblin décor of Jimmy's flat, too... the irl domicile of Begos). The living space looks like it's been phosphorescently lit by Gaspar Noé so you know something is amiss, and sure enough we soon witness a first person gravity defying alien assault as little grey (blue, green, red - depending on what part of the flat they're in) men have their way with our hero.
It's an exhilarating and fun opening which sets the tone for what is to follow in increasingly violent strokes. Stiggs (Matt Mercer, Alan Moore lookalike) is called over to complete the double act and facilitates Jimmy and Stiggs' thematic interests of male friendship and substance use. Stiggs is estranged from Jimmy, the former having cleaned up while his now-frenemy is still resolutely an addict, a situation complicated by the ability of controlled substances to ward off the very extra-terrestrial dickheads who hold the apartment to siege... Through a film predicated upon outer space invasion, as in Bliss Begos once again investigates the implications of inner space exploration, the way that drugs both give and take, and the foolhardiness of those who think that they can manage the balance.
However, as the reconciled pals fight back against the bulbously headed off-world life forms, their little bodies smashing open in various shades of primary coloured gore as Jimmy and Stiggs pummel them with household items and power tools, receiving their share of physical abuse in retaliation, the film's thematic concerns are sidelined by the brute force of Jimmy and Stiggs' physicality. Like an extended, maximised version of that scene in Kill Bill 2 when they have a fight in a caravan, Jimmy and Stiggs full on commits to the bit with its absurdist body horror and cartoon carnage.
Worthwhile horror should always polarise, and it's not for me this sort of endurance test of gore and slapstick brutality, but it's not quite for the limits of the fanboy peanut gallery either. Begos showcases a desire to push not only himself and Mercer but the parameters of viscerality. Jimmy and Stiggs reminds you not of past horror glories, but why you fell in love with the genre in the first place: the immediacy, the DIY aesthetic, the passion horror entails. In its gleeful inventiveness, its bad trip energy and utter sincerity, Jimmy and Stiggs is a triumph not just of genre but of personal and original filmmaking.
Jimmy and Stiggs is on UK/ROI VOD from February 16th.
