At the climax of Jimmy And Stiggs, the latest 16mm-shot splatterfest from raconteur writer/director Joe Begos, a man’s head is split open by an alien parasite. The bug-eyed little monster crawls out of his skull and skitters across the floor, leaving behind a ruined corpse in a pool of blood. Seeing this carnage, the man’s still-living companion puts a pair of pliers in his mouth and tries to extract his own alien embryo implant before the same fate befalls him. The soundtrack to this gnarly bit of extraterrestrial Grand Guignol is “To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me,” the opening song from experimental doom duo the Body’s 2014 album I Shall Die Here, produced by the Haxan Cloak. There’s always been something otherworldly about the Body vocalist Chip King’s whistle-register death howls, so it was especially satisfying for Begos to make the connection explicit against a canvas of alien gore and strobe lights.
Moments like those are quintessentially Begos. In his short but prolific career, the Los Angeles-based director has made vampire films (Bliss), action thrillers (VFW), and holiday slashers (Christmas Bloody Christmas). Now, with Jimmy And Stiggs, he’s made his first foray into science fiction. But Begos’ true genre is the Heavy Metal Movie. The inclusion of a song by the Body is not what makes Jimmy And Stiggs a Heavy Metal Movie, though it helps. The Heavy Metal Movie is something that you know when you see it, and in Begos’ films, it’s impossible not to see it. He’s obsessed with metal, yes, but also classic horror, practical effects, gore, nudity, profanity, neon, drugs, booze, and the gritty, DIY grindhouse aesthetic you can only get by shooting on film. It’s fun to pick out the needle drops in his movies, but even when it’s playing on mute, a Joe Begos production is metal as fuck.
The Heavy Metal Movie as an art form has existed for as long as the music has, if not longer. Black Sabbath famously plucked their name from a 1963 Mario Bava anthology—a Heavy Metal Movie through and through, despite arriving the same year as the first two Beatles albums. The genre was articulated most thoroughly by the critic Mike “McBeardo” McPadden in his exhaustive (if exhaustingly titled) 2014 tome, Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok In The 666 Most Ear- And Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! In his book, McPadden never spells out a dictionary definition for the Heavy Metal Movie, instead choosing to demonstrate its spirit by writing pithy, sometimes acerbic blurbs for 550 pages of examples. Each entry, from The Abominable Dr. Phibes to Zardoz, comes with a bullet-pointed list of qualities that grant it entry to the canon: Satanic Blood Orgy; Psycho ‘Nam Vets; Motorcycles; Barbarians; Extreme Gore. Special attention is paid to films whose cast includes metal musicians, or whose soundtrack features metal bands. That’s not enough, of course; there needs to be an aura of ineffable metalness around a movie for it to make the cut, and McPadden is an expert at sorting the wheat from the chaff. If you care about this kind of stuff, his book is the Bible.
McPadden died in 2020, and he was never able to put out what would have surely been a killer second edition of Heavy Metal Movies. Just think of some of the films that could have been added. There’s Robert Eggers’ The Northman, a blood-soaked Viking revenge flick that ends with a naked swordfight on a volcano. Damien Leone’s Terrifier franchise pushed the boundaries of onscreen gore in semi-mainstream moviemaking, and it gave the world a new slasher icon in the sadistic Art the Clown. Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor took on the “video nasties” era of UK media censorship with gleeful abandon, and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road gave us the Doof Warrior, possibly the most metal character in film this century. Metal itself isn’t anywhere close to its ’80s cultural pinnacle, when writing songs about The Evil Dead and The House By The Cemetery could help propel a band to a lucrative career. Yet it seems the Heavy Metal Movie is still alive and well.
This summer alone saw a trio of Heavy Metal Movies hit theaters—two that hit the mark, and one that badly missed it. Jimmy And Stiggs, which is available on VOD this Wednesday, comes close to the genre’s platonic ideal. In its opening moments, we get a first-person look at the apartment of down-on-his-luck horror director Jimmy (played by Begos), a claustrophobic space we won’t leave for the next 80 minutes. Jimmy’s walls are adorned with posters for Cannibal Holocaust and Sleep’s Dopesmoker, and a ’70s porno blares from the TV. He seems like he’s about to settle in for a nice, quiet night of abusing drugs and alcohol and screaming at his agent on the phone when he hears a strange sound. The next thing he knows, he’s levitating in his bedroom. When he wakes from a semi-lucid blackout, it’s the next day, and evidence begins to mount that he was abducted by aliens.