Butt Boy is a single joke stretched over one hundred minutes. However, the film is elevated by its sheer and unrelenting commitment.
At its core, Butt Boy is a piece of surrealist comedy. Chip Gutchell is a middle aged man who works a deadend job “in computers” and lives with a wife who seems actively hostile to the idea of intimacy with him. His life is empty and meaningless, until he has a spiritual experience in the middle of a proctology exam. Chip becomes obsessed with placing objects in his butt, indulging those urges whenever he is left unattended. Gradually, those desires grow in intensity with catastrophic results.
It is a naturally absurd set-up, one that simultaneous offers broad riffs on heterosexual masculine anxieties and the escalating horrors of addiction. After several people go missing, alcoholic police officer Russel Fox begins to put the pieces together with no idea about where it might end. Butt Boy is an ultra low budget independent film, and unapologetically so. Everything is hypersaturated, props and locations often seem improvised, and the quality of performance varies wildly from scene-to-scene. More than that, the film is essentially an extended riff on one comedic set-up.
And yet, in spite of all of that, Butt Boy works surprisingly well. The key is the film’s single-minded focus on that single absurd premise, on the image of a man who has developed an anal fixation so strong that he at point tries to consume an entire police car. Butt Boy never flinches. It never breaks eye contact. It never corpses, not matter how far it follows that premise down its various rabbit holes. There is something strangely appealing in that, which suggests a bright future for writer, director and lead actor Tyler Cornack.
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