What do you get when you combine an infant sex doll, horny criminals in clown makeup, and a shit ton of worms? If your answer was “a bad trip,” then you’re pretty much right: it’s one of the stranger films to make the festival circuit recently, and perhaps one of the most polarizing. Alex Phillips’ All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is a strange jaunt into deeply bizarre territory, but it’s not without its charm.
The film hurls the audience into a seedy alternate reality filled with debauchery and excess where everything teeter-totters on the brink of nonsense but doesn’t dive in head first. While there isn’t a plot in the traditional sense and reads more like a series of vignettes, it mostly follows several individuals pursuing their desires in various ways. Roscoe is the closest person to a protagonist here, and he’s a motel maintenance man who is unhappy that his girlfriend Samantha brought another man into their relationship. Meanwhile, a man named Benny yearns to become a father and orders a doll to practice his paternal skills. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong sort of doll for that type of wholesome pursuit — he ends up with a very disturbing-looking sex doll. These stories intersect through Henrietta, a hooker whom Benny spends time with and whose hotel room is Roscoe’s to clean. She accidentally leaves behind an unusual hallucinogenic in her room that’s all the rage: worms. And well, this ends up opening a can of them. Roscoe and Samantha begin to become “wormheads,” and their new pastime devolves into a whirlwind of sex and violence.
All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is a fun exploration of some odd characters and concepts, but doesn’t always have even footing. The parts intended to be funny don’t always land, or sometimes it’s unclear whether humor was the filmmaker’s intent. Audiences will likely view it with equal parts confusion, amusement, and uncomfortable laughter. What makes the film work is the actors’ commitment to their roles, no matter how absurd the scenarios they experience are. Some of their dialogue is borderline ridiculous, but the actors have enough conviction to deliver the lines with heart, and it keeps viewers engaged enough to see it through to the end. There’s a constant sense, however, that the stories should tie together thematically more than they do, but it’s a good time nonetheless.
As odd as it sounds after describing the premise of the film, the film almost plays it too safe sometimes stylistically. Despite the concepts primarily driving the film sounding borderline insane, the aesthetic of the film doesn’t match the level of intensity as the ideas surrounding it. There’s a few interesting editing choices during the “worm trips” and a few great practical gore effects which make a bold statement, but there’s still something about the presentation of the film that feels banal overall. It needs to be more jarring to pack a better punch, and could have been trippier to match the hallucinogenic nature of the film. In other words, if you’re going to be weird, be really weird.
All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is not for everyone, nor was it intended to be. However, for oddballs looking for something different, this will be right up their alley. If you’re feeling adventurous, check it out on the horror streaming service Screambox when it arrives there on November 8th.
—Andrea Riley