Article #236656

Joe Begos’s gross-out aims for sensory assault but delivers only visual noise, numbing gore and a weary joke stretched far beyond endurance

This is a DayGlo-hued, heavy metal-spackled horror film that clearly hopes to provoke nausea in viewers with its abundant scenes of dismemberment and plentiful use of shaky-cam first-person point-of-view footage. But given that the “blood” being spurted out is mostly bright orange and belongs to extraordinarily fake-looking alien creatures, the effect is neither gross-out nor even the slightest bit engrossing; it is just boring and headache-inducing. Just as you should bring tissues to see Hamnet, viewers are advised to bring painkillers to this, and possibly a good book to read during the dull interstitial bits.

Made over several years in a single scuzzy apartment, Jimmy and Stiggs is the brainchild of writer-director-producer-star Joe Begos, who made the marginally better Christmas Bloody Christmas a few years ago and who plays title character Jimmy here. Having made a bunch of horror films with his lifelong friend Stiggs (Matt Mercer) – we see fictional trailers of them at the beginning, definitely the high point from which it all goes downhill – Jimmy’s career is evidently in a slump and he spends his time getting drunk and high in his grimy hovel, which has a cool jellyfish tank and seems lit exclusively by black-lights, like a 14-year-old metalhead’s dream digs.