Jimmy and Stiggs
His career on hold, filmmaker Jimmy Lang is going to have to face some unpleasant truths if he is going to secure work, his agent telling him that within the industry he is regarded as a wild card who cannot be relied upon without the balancing force of his former creative partner to counteract his impulsiveness, the two of them not having spoken to each other since Stiggs Randolph decided to get clean.
Understandably reticent to subject himself to the undeniable bad influence of his former best friend, a desperate call brings Stiggs to the door of the “Pickford Palace” to find Jimmy’s night of drink, drugs and watching porn have left him disturbed, distraught and deranged, claiming to have lost time and been attacked by aliens, Stiggs refusing to indulge the insane coked-up ramblings until he too experiences strange displacements in time and space.
The sixth feature from director Joe Begos who also wrote the script and stars in the lead role where normally he would only appear as a cameo, Jimmy and Stiggs is as manic as might be expected from the man whose career has seen killer alien possessions in Almost Human, enhanced murderous telepathy in The Mind’s Eye, tripped out vampires in Bliss and a siege situation at his local VFW outpost before unleashing Christmas Bloody Christmas.
With Matt Mercer as long-suffering and – at least initially – more sober Stiggs, the premise was conceived as a lockdown project of minimal requirement, Begos’ own flat the principal location, increasingly trashed through a series of nightmarish sleep paralysis episodes and increasingly manic direct close encounters familiar to any who watched early seasons of The X-Files, but while Disclosure Day recently did the same with grandiose pomposity Jimmy and Stiggs is a splatter movie of screaming excess and pumping Day-Glo orange blood.
Like Grabbers, realising the aliens are susceptible to alcohol, Jimmy and Stiggs proceed to get tanked, perhaps not their best defence as puggled to oblivion strategy goes down the drain and paranoid arguments arise, but the only one open to them other than Jimmy’s cache of weapons he’s held on to from previous productions, the battle on for the future of indie filmmaking, standing alongside the similarly conceived Nebula-75 as an example of what invention and determination can achieve under constraint, as well as the narrow gap between madness and genius.
Gleefully unsophisticated, Jimmy and Stiggs is not Begos’ best film but nor does it aim to do more than simply entertain, the development of the situation minimal but with the camera in constant motion, the colours flowing and a few genuinely creepy moments in the isolation, noises in the dark, flashbacks and glimpses of grim things to come through through time disjointed, the brief running time bolstered by a brace of bad trailers for films which don’t exist, The Piano Killer and Don’t Go In That House, Bitch.
Jimmy and Stiggs is streaming on Shudder now
