It’s always said that any artist leaves a trace of themselves in their work. It therefore takes a certain reserve to balance the id with the art, to create a work about yourself and not drown in ego. Making a film like The Fabelmans or The 400 Blows is an exercise in restraint. Let that ego go unchecked, and you end up with sanctimonious pseudo-intellectualism like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance of Reality.
Jimmy & Stiggs definitely falls closer to the latter category, as filmmaker Joe Begos spends an hour-plus playing a thinly-veiled sci-fi nightmare version of himself. He’s Jimmy Lang, a low-budget director who made a fortune for some indie studios and now can barely even get them to return his calls. His days are spent strung out in his apartment, blowing off phone calls from his girlfriend because who needs that hassle, right, man?
The first acquisition and release from Eli Roth’s new underground gore distributor, the Horror Section, begins in promising fashion: with a POV shot from Jimmy’s perspective of his rage-fueled bender in his cooler-than-cool L.A. apartment, all neon and vintage movie posters. By the end it’s a slime-covered mass of putrefaction decorated with random human and unearthly body parts as Jimmy and his oldest and possibly only friend, Stiggs (Mercer), fight off attempted abduction by aliens. The sleazy but stylish apartment has become a Day Glo-splattered low-rent haunted house under siege from Party City-level alien puppets.
Looking and directing more and more like a discount Rob Zombie, Begos’ biggest vanity is thinking he can handle the lead role, scream-reading through zonked-out lines like “I’ve got alien blood all over this goddam apartment, I’ve got an implant in my fucking head, and now I’ve got some asshole in my goddam face!” There’s too much Jimmy and not enough Stiggs, with Mercer barely denting the Begos Show.
Everything that made Begos unmissable as a director in splattertastic delights like VFW, aChristmas Bloody Christmas, and Bliss seems buried here, turning his signature style into a pastiche of itself. Even at a potentially taut 80 minutes, Jimmy & Stiggs becomes little more than a series of tedious and substandard effects reels, with Begos (sorry, Jimmy) interjecting sporadically with rambling, coked-out speeches about aliens and “Jimmy’s” genius as a filmmaker.
If Begos wasn’t an established figure on the underground, Jimmy & Stiggs might seem like a calling card movie from an aspiring gore hound from some out-of-the-way city with no real film scene – what used to be called regional filmmaking. The uninformed viewer might think, ‘Hey, this is cool in an amateurish way. What would happen if this filmmaker was given real assets, a real script, and a real budget?” The only problem is that we’ve seen what Begos does with all that, and it’s so much better. So why watch him with one arm behind his back, flailing self-indulgently?
Let’s make no mistakes here, miracles can be done on zero budget. Just look what Ryan Kruger (Street Trash) pulled off with the psychotropic mayhem of 2020’s Fried Barry, another alien abduction shocker but this time told with wit, pathos, and an undeniable verve. Begos just relies on glowing paint, gross-out effects, and flashing lights. It’s like early, pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson without any grasp of its own ridiculousness, even when Stiggs and Jimmy are mudwrestling in bubbling alien goo. It’s the trippy sequences of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without the queasy self-loathing. It’s the video to “Smack My Bitch Up” by the Prodigy, complete with POV debauchery, running on repeat 20 times. It’s … boring.
Cool apartment, though.
This article appears in August 15 • 2025.
