99 min.
Release Date: April 14, 2020 (Digital & On Demand)
Calling your movie “Butt Boy” immediately attracts attention, like a “Snakes on a Plane” or “Hot Tub Time Machine.” With an even more off-the-wall premise matching the juvenile title, it would sound like a lowbrow joke, but this is a legitimate motion picture and not "bad" by design like a grindhouse homage. Puerile and ridiculous but played with a knowingly deadpan sincerity, this high-concept, low-budget B-movie should deliver as an outrageous midnight movie but cannot sustain itself beyond a conceptual level. Before writer-director-star Tyler Cornack and co-writer Ryan Koch revel in the inherent silliness and sheer weirdness, “Butt Boy” is actually a deliberately self-serious but monotonous neo-noir, as if John Waters came up with the concept and Michael Mann directed it his way. Hard to believe it exists, this would all seem to exist better as a short.
Dweeby IT worker Chip Gutchell (Tyler Cornack) is stuck in a depressing cubicle job and a passionless marriage. After a routine prostate exam, he gets hooked on a certain act that becomes an addiction: sticking objects up his rectum. Chip’s new favorite pastime begins with a bar of soap, then a TV remote, and then escalates to a family dog that mysteriously goes missing. Next up, while out in the park, Chip kidnaps a baby up his sphincter, and the baby just disappears. Nine years later after a suicide attempt, Chip might be on the mend, attending AA meetings. Masquerading as a recovering alcoholic who’s doing the work, he meets Russel Fox (Tyler Rice), a hard-ass, hard-drinking police detective, and becomes Russell's AA sponsor. And then, eventually, Detective Fox is assigned to the case of a missing child at Chip’s office on “Take Your Child to Work Day” that just might be connected to Chip’s poison of choice.
Low-key and bonkers all at once, “Butt Boy” plays everything unwaveringly straight like a police procedural and an addiction drama rolled into one, right down to the propulsive synth-heavy score (by Cornack and co-writer Ryan Koch) and William Morean’s shadowy cinematography that occasionally pops with neon. The film lives or dies on the viewer just going along with the insane, anatomy-defying leap of its premise and allowing logic to just roll off their back, like nothing in Chip’s never-ending anal cavity actually passing. When we finally see Chip’s butt at work, sucking everything up like a vacuum and making him stronger somehow, the film is such lunacy that one can’t help but laugh with it. Same goes with when characters become prisoners in Chip’s cavernous black-hole bowels, like Pinocchio and Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, and plan their escape to go-for-broke ends.
As if the title wasn’t already a clear indication, “Butt Boy” isn’t high art, and yet it commendably takes enough commitment to see a patently absurd conceit like this through. Tyler Cornack takes the milquetoast sadsack role seriously without garnering much sympathy as Chip, who's essentially a serial killer. As Detective Fox, Tyler Rice embraces the gruff, greasy-haired, hard-boiled cop stereotype but still keeps a poker face. If reviewing “Butt Boy” is worthwhile for anything, it offers a full education in finding synonyms for “butthole.” In watching it, though, this little oddity isn’t fun enough and sometimes a slog to get through. There is nothing else quite like it—the only other anus-centric movie that comes to mind is 2013’s horror-comedy
“Bad Milo” about a digestive-tract demon going on a killing spree—but the title might be more interesting than most things in the film itself.
Grade: C
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