All Jacked Up and Full of Worms: Grungy Geek Fantasy Promises a 'High' It Can't Deliver

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C-plus

Premiering at the Fantasia International Film Festival in July, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, is a horror-comedy from Chicago native Alex Phillips that pretty much peaks with its flashy title.

Running a little more than 70-minutes, it’s less a drama than a disjointed collection of vignettes about marginalized people who get addicted to ingesting hallucinogenic earthworms.

Director Phillips says it was inspired by a psychotic break he experienced in his twenties. But that background gives too much serious credit to a film that’s essentially a generic riff on a school-yard taunt. Eating worms is already the subject of two children’s novels: Thomas Rockwell’s How to Eat Fried Worms and R. L. Stine’s Go Eat Worms.

There are two protagonist worm-eaters, a couple of adult misfits, who meet and then trip out together through most the film.

Roscoe (Phillip Andre Botello) is the almost normal one, a maintenance man in a scuzzy motel who is being openly cheated on by his girlfriend. Benny (Trevor Dawkins), who is delusional,, takes a sex worker to that same motel, hoping she might become a mother to the infant doll he bought online, which he is trying to make human.

Soon, both Roscoe and Benny end up getting addicted to worms on a one-way spiral to psychological and narrative chaos. In the course of the film, they encounter other bizarre characters, including a violent couple of worm-eaters.

There’s also a ubiquitous evangelical TV show about a worm king humming along in the background to a song about a “worm king.”

There are the usual body-horror tropes of nudity, vomit and viscera, and some unusual doll abuse.  

Sound and visual effects are inventive in a low-budget way —including a scene in which Roscoe envisions a giant worm floating in the air, like a Chinese paper dragon. There are even a couple of jokes that sort of land: Want to get high faster? Snort your worms. What would worm addicts do when their supply runs out? Rob a live bait shop, of course.

So, points for shoe-string filmmaking on several fronts. But however open-minded one might try to be, it’s hard to imagine how high, or how low, you’d have to be to recognize human beings in this grungy geek fantasy.

All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. Written and directed by Alex Phillips. Starring Phillip Andre Botello, Trevor Dawkins and Betsey Brown. All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is available on Apple iTunes, Google/YouTube, TVOD and Xbox VOD, and at Ottawa’s Mayfair Theatre, Nov. 10-14.