With such a long pedigree of films which have explored altered states in impressively oddball ways, it presumably gets tougher and tougher for filmmakers to distinguish their own impressively oddball films from the rest. Well, a title like ‘All Jacked Up and Full of Worms‘ is certainly a good start. The film itself goes further still, by electing to almost completely detach itself from anything like narrative coherence or expected plot markers. Sure, there have been others along these lines, but All Jacked Up does it to an impressive and – strangely enough – consistent extent. Is it enjoyable? No, not really; it’s still something you want to wander along with for the full extent of its seventy minutes, though, even if only to honour the commitment you wind up feeling you’ve made to it.
So, plot, plot…we start with a by-now obligatory analogue TV and 80s-heyday talk show where a character lays down some of our key themes by talking about his personal experiences: paganism, making a study out of the occult, extensive drug use and a descent to hell which he relates to – consuming worms. Write those terms down on some cards and overlay them on what follows, if you will. We meet a bunch of drug users seemingly united by their desire to escape their own physical confines through drugs; it works to an extent, but one of them, motel worker Rosco (Phillip Andre Botello) doesn’t always have the most positive experiences. Part of his ongoing desire to imbibe seems to stay in favour with girlfriend Samantha (Betsey Brown), whose quest to get high is an existential thing.
Meanwhile, frustrated wannabe dad Benny (Trevor Dawkins) has had a disconcerting experience with what he somehow thought was a mail order baby he could nurture, but turns out to be even weirder than that. Consoling himself with a visit to a local sex worker, he is surprised when she offers him a…worm, a regular garden worm, from a cigarillo box – which she swears can be taken to get high. His initial refusal soon turns into a ‘yes’, and he’s joined by a despondent Rosco who also agrees to try it. Cue a band of merry misfits wandering the streets in a fine old state, though not everyone with the worm habit is as friendly and harmless as these guys initially seem to be.
When I read the title and synopsis for this, my mind went to two titles: Fried Barry, which featured at Fantasia in 2020, and Frank Henenlotter’s film Brain Damage, with its own mind-bending – but rather more erudite – hallucinogenic worm, called Aylmer/Elmer. All told, All Jacked Up is more similar to Fried Barry than the Henenlotter title: it shares that kind of scuzzy, but muted, meandering feel, its characters rocking up often aimlessly in the worst dives and backstreets of the city where it takes place. Think a kind of Don Quixote, but with hallucinogenic worms (and by the way, the worms appearing as extras definitely pull their weight here). So All Jacked Up takes place in a grubby array of places, and features a small array of characters who are linked by only the barest of connections. They each seem bewildered whilst speaking to one another for the most part, their conversations a dawdling array of non-sequiturs and clearly lots of improvised lines, albeit some of the dialogue is very droll. Eventually, the film introduces more SFX; the film becomes briefly splattery, with a few imaginative additions.
Perhaps the film’s main issue for this viewer is that it never quite opts for the big, bold ick factor or a weightier/funnier character study, but rather meanders between these points; of course, that’s laden with generic expectations of one kind and another, which presumably the director and writer Alex Phillips knows full well and has deliberately dodged. Fair enough. So it’s not really a cautionary drugs tale and it’s not really a study of modern alienation, though it skirts close to the latter; in its way All Jacked Up is a kind of lockdown nod to Cronenberg as much as Henenlotter. This is arthouse with no gloss whatsoever but a few nods to horror and some wry moments of humour.
All Jacked Up and Full of Worms will feature at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2022 on 16th July.