Jimmy and Stiggs: Joe Begos sci-fi horror film acquired by Eli Roth’s The Horror Section

When Joe Begos‘s holiday horror film Christmas Bloody Christmas was released back in December of 2022 (you can read an 8/10 review from our own JimmyO HERE), the writer/director let it be known that he was hoping to make two sequels to that movie. But first, he intended to wrap up a horror project he had been working on since the early days of the Covid pandemic lockdowns: an alien invasion horror movie that he stars in, because the alternative would have been to cast someone who was in the Screen Actors Guild, which would have added thousands to the budget. Now we know that his sci-fi horror project is called Jimmy and Stiggs, and Variety reports that The Horror Section, a company that was just launched by genre regular Eli Roth last month, has acquired the distribution rights to the film. The Horror Section is teaming up with Iconic Events to give Jimmy and Stiggs a wide theatrical release on August 15th.

The film follows a down-on-his-luck filmmaker (Begos) who claims he was abducted by aliens, vowing to bring them down alongside his friend (Matt Mercer). Here’s how Begos previously described the project while speaking with The Boo Crew podcast (with thanks to Bloody Disgusting for the transcription): “I play a coked out filmmaker who is at the edge of his wits. Everybody around him has cut him off, and the opening scene is him just melting down. His manager hangs up the phone, it’s all shot in POV for the opening scene, and then he gets abducted by aliens, in this really f*cking crazy scene. And then he wakes up and he can’t really remember, but it starts to come back to him. So he convinces a friend to come over. His friend comes over and starts telling him, ‘Dude, you have a drug problem.’ And then while his friend’s there, they come back. And then his friend gets abducted. And he’s locked in the apartment because they start to control his mind and everything’s bricked off and it becomes this hallucinatory battle where he’s constantly doing a bunch of cocaine and painkillers because they put an implant in him, but he also needs to stay awake. So he’s doing coke and painkillers while blowing away these aliens. The lights are getting all f*cked up and the place gets covered in neon blood and the camera’s just spinning. And then his friend comes back but he’s infected with an alien and then I get abducted again.“

Begos originally thought he could knock out this alien invasion movie on a 35 day shooting schedule, but production stretched far beyond that and was broken up into multiple different filming periods. The filmmaker also told The Boo Crew that the aliens in the film are animatronic.

Roth told Variety, “Rarely does a film stop me in my tracks the way Jimmy and Stiggs did. I grew up on Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson’s low budget over the top splatter fests, and very few filmmakers have ever achieved that level of insanity. Horror fans have not had an experience like this in the theatres in a long time and the spirit, anarchy and fun of the movie represents everything I want to bring to the masses in theatres.“

Are you interested in Joe Begos’s Jimmy and Stiggs, and are you glad to hear that The Horror Section is bringing it to theatres? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

In addition to Christmas Bloody Christmas, Begos previously directed Almost Human, The Mind’s Eye, Bliss, and VFW.

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