Writer-director Joe Begos specialises in highly-coloured, lively, knowing exercises in extreme genre – his earliest features, Almost Human and The Mind’s Eye, are almost controlled, but the vampire/artist spiral-into-insanity picture Bliss seems to have been a turning point, immediately followed by kinetic carnage B pics VFW and Christmas Bloody Christmas. This latest exercise is simultaneously minimalist (two characters, one setting) and maximalist (every excess imaginable, in dayglo spurts), returning to the themes (alien abduction, troubled male friendship) of Almost Human but with a newfound fervour for trashing everything in sight. It rips along for 79 minutes, which may be a quarter of an hour more than many audiences will be willing to put up with – it’s relentless, astonishing and a total headbang, but you might well get as tired of it as Jimmy’s longtime pal Stiggs is of him and for understandable reasons. But perhaps that’s also the point of the picture and the leap into space at the end is why we were here in the first place.
Jimmy Lang (Begos himself) – whose name echoes Jimmy Laine, the acting alter ego of pioneer in these paint-gore-spattered halls Abel Ferrara circa The Driller Killer – is one-half of a filmmaking team with his childhood pal Stiggs Randolph (Matt Mercer) – whose name evokes half of the toxic buddy couple in few people’s favourite Robert Altman film O.C. and Stiggs. However, some months ago, Stiggs opted to get sober and cut the drug-and-alcohol-fuelled Jimmy out of his life – which infuriates Jimmy mostly because no one will back him to make films on his own. We first see the world (or rather Jimmy’s apartment) through his eyes, which mostly involves lines of disappearing coke and tipped-back bottles, as he rants on the phone and is then struck with a fit of levitation which brings him near a dangerous ceiling fan. With all his substance abuse issues and general boiling temper, it’s easy to see why Stiggs and everyone else has called it quits on a relationship with him – and that’s even before coping with his paranoid belief that he’s been abducted by aliens, given tracking implants in his jaw and is the target of some intergalactic aggression. Of course, this being Begos’ movie – and, by extension, Jimmy’s – he’s right, and melon-headed aliens show up to harass him, and squirt brightly-coloured ichor when he fights back.
Stiggs shows up and is instantly bombarded with abuse by his friend – who insists that (as in Grabbers) alcohol is the only thing which renders humans invulnerable to alien monsters and that he should forsake his hard-won sobriety to take part in the never-ending battle against the ET bastards. Almost Human – whose star Josh Ethier is heard on the soundtrack as the fed-up agent – was acute about male friendship and its drawbacks, whereas this is a blunt instrument of a movie. There might be a core of an idea about Jimmy’s feeling that Stiggs has betrayed him by getting sober. Abel Ferrara is again evoked in the notion that an outsider genre filmmaking artist has to be on the hardest drugs imaginable – an aspect of Ferrara’s own technique featured in Dangerous Game/Snake Eyes, which co-starred James Russo, who appears in video clips here playing alien abduction survivor/paranoid conspiracy theorist John Redgrave.
However, this is too committed to splat to get into what it is between Jimmy and Stiggs – again, this might be the point in that Jimmy is so far down his own rabbit hole that he is only interested in his old friendship insofar as it’s a part of his own mythology, in which he is a heroic warrior against alien activity. The thing is that, in the universe of the film, he’s right … and it’s hard not to see the way the plot pans out, especially when Stiggs literally gets his head expanded, as Jimmy’s reward while the depiction of a totally out-of-control asshole as humanity’s last hope might not be the most useful notion to explore at this point in history. It’s also likely that even this nugget of character is not the point – ignore the yelling and ranting, and get drawn into the maelstrom of bright insanity.
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