There was a scene early on in the new indie pic ‘Jimmy and Judy’ where Judy, played by Rachael Bella, is sitting nude on the bed when her deranged boyfriend Jimmy, portrayed by Edward Furlong, brings her his dad’s shotgun to play with.  Judy takes the gun, place it between her 34b’s (Hey, that’s what she said they were), and started licking up and down the barrel.  You don’t see that everyday.  Not at least where I’m from.  It’s scenes such as that that frame ‘Jimmy and Judy’, yet another tale of kids gone wild that is an eclectic mix of the odd, bizarre, violent and sexual that works sometimes, fails sometimes, but like a train wreck, it’s difficult to turn away.

Writer / Directors Randall Rubin and Jon Schroder shoot the film completely through the lens of Jimmy’s camcorder, similar in style to ‘The Blair Witch Project’, thus I would imagine, placing this film squarely in the realm of the ‘experimental’.  We see what twenty one year old Jimmy sees, or whoever happens to be holding his camera at the time.  Jimmy is attempting to document his entire life, and takes the camera with him everywhere.  Jimmy is also a bit disturbed as shown by his penchant to crash his parent’s parties in the buff, or hiding in their closet filming their freaky sex games.  Judy, a high school senior, is an outcast similar to Jimmy and is mercilessly abused at school.  Jimmy invites Judy to his room to show her something he thinks ‘will change her life’.  They’ve known each other their whole lives, but aren’t really close, mainly because Jimmy is so weird, until he shows her his gift to her.  After this moment, Jimmy and Judy embark upon a strange, violent, natural born killing journey.

‘Jimmy and Judy’ works best as a character study, observing the deterioration, basically of Judy, since Jimmy is pretty much gone from the get go.  As all of the

action takes place through the lens of someone holding a camera, there are long scenes with no cuts and the actors do quite well in handling these long, sometimes meandering soliloquies.  Credit is to be given to the directors who managed to take this concept and make it work for practically the entire movie.  It had it’s moment of tedium in some the scenes, but for the most part it worked well.  In particular, there a scene when Jimmy had to drop the camera as he was being pulled over by a policeman.  The camera was shooting Judy’s foot for a good five minutes, but the action that we couldn’t see was interesting and intriguing.

Special kudos to Rachael Bella who as an actress had the challenge of being the only character who goes through major changes throughout the film and had to perform a large part of her acting naked.  It may have helped that her real life husband is Edward Furlong, but it still couldn’t be easy.

This is a movie that ain’t for everyone.  It’s hard to watch in some parts and the single hand held camera technique can become disorienting at times.  There were people who got up and left the theater at some parts, but in my opinion that was there loss as this was a welcome change from the regurgitated crap I’ve been forced to see throughout 2006.  Recommended, but guardedly so, is ‘Jimmy and Judy’.