Movie Review: Butt Boy

Butt Boy * ½ / *****

Directed by: Tyler Cornack.

Written by: Tyler Cornack and Ryan Koch.

Starring: Tyler Cornack (Chip Gutchell), Tyler Rice (Detective Russel Fox), Angela Jones (Doctor Morean), Kristina Clifford (Judy), Gail Bloyd (Gail), Shelby Dash (Anne Gutchell), Colleen Elizabeth Miller (Cindy), Tyler Dryden (Marty Gutchell), Austin Lewis (Rick Sanders), Brad Potts (Chief Lazarra), Steven James Tingus (Herbert Cough), Anna Wholey (Detective Hoffner), Jeremiah Jahi (Frank), Kai Henderson (Andrew Lee), Larry Ludwig (Mayor Michael Cage), Wilky Lau (Jon Lee), Sol Lane (Young Marty), Robert Ackerman Moss (Nelson Guerra).

 

Butt Boy is one of those movies with a premise so outlandish that someone like me finds it impossible to resist at least watching it to see if the filmmakers can pull it off. This is deadpan comedy/detective noir/1990s period piece about a mild mannered IT guy who likes to stick things up his butt. He gets hooked on the practice during a rectal exam, and soon everything he can find goes up there. And then small objects won’t do – and he develops some kind of superhuman ability to suck any and everything up there – starting with dogs, but escalating to young children as well. He eventually has a nemesis in the form of an alcoholic police detective he meets at AA, and is investigating the latest child disappearance. It takes him a while to zone in on the suspect – and longer still to figure out just exactly he is doing. Not surprisingly, he cannot get anyone to take him seriously.

 

The film was co-written, directed by and starring Tyler Cornack – who has the role of Chip, the man who likes to stick things up his butt. Chip is one of those guys indie movies love – boring IT guys, stuck in a loveless, passionless marriage, at a boring corporate job with an overly cheerful boss, etc. You know the type from many a movie before Butt Boy – and he’ll be a cliché long after. That in itself isn’t a problem – its almost precisely the point actually, as Chip is a master of anal retention even before he masters, well, literal anal retention. Cornack’s performance goes for deadpan laughs – yet it’s never really all that funny. When Detective Russel Fox (Tyler Rice) is introduced, it at least adds a different element to the film. The two leads have some interesting scenes together – but you can never really get over the fact that we know that Chip is responsible for the disappearances, and how, and we have to wait a long (long) time for Fox to catch up.

 

Put simply, Butt Boy is perhaps a 15-minute short stretched out to 100 minutes. It’s the same jokes, the same scenes again and again as Cornack and company wait to deliver its bloody, explosive climax. That is, admittedly, a good climax even if it’s a predictable one. But in short, it comes at the end of a movie that is basically a one joke concept, and plays with it for far too long. Sometimes a strange concept isn’t enough – you need to come up with something to keep things interesting for 100 minutes once the shock value of that premise wears off.