The latest slice of neon and bloodshed from writer-director Joe Begos is arguably even more lo-fi and low-budget than usual. Fans of his work will find plenty to enjoy, I suspect, but others may be turned off by the strange energy of it.
Begos also stars onscreen as Jimmy Lang, a man who has a close encounter of the probing kind one evening. Determined not to let it happen again, he prepares to fight back against anything else that enters his home. That includes his friend, Stiggs Randolph (Matt Mercer), although maybe the two can work together to cause some harm to creatures that certainly don't come in peace.
This is a mess, but I expected that from a Begos movie. Unfortunately, it's a strangely boring and unimpressive mess. That's certainly not what I expected. Apparently shot in the home of Begos over four years, starting during wild times of the Covid pandemic, this may only run for 79 minutes, but it feels at least twice that long. And that's not to do with my viewing being extended by some fake movie trailers at the start (the best one being "The Piano Killer") that ensure you cannot forget Eli Roth being on board as a producer.
Moving between POV shots and more standard camerawork, Begos tries hard to make up for the single location. That cannot be done with energy and movement alone though. I would politely suggest that Begos spends more time on his next project working on the script. While I disagree with the idea that swearing equates to less intelligence, there's an obvious reason why one of the main bits of trivia for this film on IMDb states "the F-word and its variations are uttered over 700 times during the film." Begos has nothing else to fill in the gaps between flashes of violence.
He does a better job as an actor than a writer, but it's still not quite enough to make it easier for viewers to spend time stuck alongside someone so irritating and uninteresting. The same goes for Mercer. Viewers don't get much of a chance to dig below the surface of either character, making it even harder to care about the ultimate outcome of the fighting and killing.
I'm not going to namecheck the specific splattery film with a third act that this felt as if it was trying to emulate, that could spoil both that film and this one, but I will say that this fares even worse when there's a point of comparison. If you're big fan of Begos then you'll already be predisposed to like this, and kudos to him for just using his time and resources to get something made (he's many things, but an easy sell is not one of them). Everyone else should approach with extreme caution, or maybe completely stay away from something that should have been used as the framing story for the last V/H/S/ anthology.
3/10
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