All Jacked Up and Full of Worms (2022) Review

Benny (Trevor Dawkins) is obsessed with being a dad, to the point where he has his own baby…of sorts. After an unfulfilling evening at a seedy motel with a local sex worker, Benny comes into the possession of a tin of hallucinogenic earthworms. Meeting the motel’s maintenance man Roscoe (Phillip Andre Botello) who is in the midst of relationship trauma himself. To escape the grind of their lives, they do the worms, catapulting them into a nightmare of sex and violence. And more worms.

From the first frame, writer/director Alex Phillips is on a mission to shock, plunging the viewer into the lives of truly repugnant people. For instance, the first glimpse of Benny’s “baby” is both breathtakingly offensive and yet irresponsibly hilarious, the rest of the movie attempting to balance queasy humour with gross visuals. It’s an equilibrium it doesn’t always maintain but when it fails it still maintains a bizarre fascination which will keep some of us watching. You know who you are.

In tone, it reminded me of Street Trash, which ploughed its own random furrows in search of an actual plot. AJUAFOW (I’m not typing it out in full every time I want to refer to the title) is less outwardly scuzzy than Jim Muro’s legendary grotfest but it’s still a decidedly grubby experience as our edge of society anti-heroes journey to ever stranger and more dangerous places in their addled state, signposted by sporadic snatches of an old, flickering video interview.

The fact that there’s little in terms of a coherent story other than “guys do drugs, chaos ensues” isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this case and, taken as a series of delusional vignettes, there’s a level on which this transgressive content genuinely works. Viewers craving character development will, however, find little here to satisfy them: redemptive arcs are absent, no one learns anything whatsoever and their descent into depravity continues apace, as do the worm snorting and consuming sequences, which are thoroughly disgusting.

If you’re looking for a hint as to where this film is going to be pitched, a glance down the cast list will reveal the name of Betsey Brown, who played Addie in the family friendly, totally innocuous The Scary Of Sixty-First. As Samantha, Brown has a different set of sexual issues this time out but she continues to be an amusingly disturbing presence even in a less pivotal role such as this.

The rest of the performers are effective at portraying debased, awful people. Dawkins in particular portrays Benny as a guy who genuinely believes he’s an upstanding member of society, with his desire for parenthood, but in reality he’s a creepy bloke with an unhealthy obsession for a specific piece of plastic. Even Roscoe, who hints at being the most well-adjusted of a bad bunch, goes along with questionable threesomes and worm snorting far too quickly, revealing himself to be a gibbering, pathetic wreck of a man, nicely played by Botello.

If there’s an amount of relative restraint shown in the first couple of acts – possibly due to budgetary limitations – the final act charges headlong into the territory marked “batshit insane” with copious vomiting, bloody knifings and intestines deployed in attack mode. The effects may be bargain basement but they’re artfully presented and effective given the tone of the overall piece. All of this climactic chaos is presented in a narcotic haze where the boundaries of reality are shattered and you’re left wondering just what the hell actually happened.

If you don’t mind a movie in which there is absolutely no one to root for, if you don’t mind a tale which is not so much non-linear as non-existent, if you don’t mind having your buttons pushed constantly in a cinematic experiment which often tries hard to make you walk out, AJUAFOW may well be for you. It panders to its audience not one iota, if in fact it’s aiming for any audience at all.

Ultimately, how do you score this film accurately? For some, this may be so far removed from their idea of what cinema should be that they’re going to be out of there before the 20-minute mark. For others, its tangential design and deviant humour will be the genre equivalent of catnip. The best advice I can give is to jettison all thoughts of logic and surrender to the heady trip. Be ready to have your sensibilities shredded.

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