Butt Boy
Chip Gutchell is empty, a gnawing void inside him needing to be filled, finding no joy in his work with its demeaning spirit-building rituals, in his family, his wife Anne understandably cold to a man who has no enthusiasm even for his suicide attempt, his son Marty distant, even the family dog Rocky indifferent to him, his life empty until he attends the doctor for a prostate examination to which he has an unexpected reaction.
Chip’s whole existence changing in a moment, like a switch being flicked, the void remains but is now active, hungrier than ever now it has been identified, at first consuming small objects as though it were testing itself, the limits of what it can consume, a bar of soap, the television remote, the family dog Rocky, but it wants more, an unattended child playing in the park…
Starring Tyler Cornack who also directs and co-wrote with Ryan Koch, to say Butt Boy is an oddity is to delicately avoid probing the central issue of Chip’s gaping hole which needs filled, insistent and demanding, occasionally sated, even for years, almost a decade having passed before he encounters Detective Russel B Fox (Tyler Rice) at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, trying to fill his own void.
A man broken by the case he could not solve, that of his own missing son, when another child goes missing at Chip’s work the detective becomes convinced that Chip is involved but is unable to provide rational cause or evidence, either to his superior or the viewer, his theory correct but so bizarre that it could not have been conceived without directly witnessing an occurrence, which despite their hot sauce dinner date he did not do.
Butt Boy a film which cries out to be outrageous, subversive and shocking, instead it gingerly plays around where it should be bold and decisive, committing the cardinal sin of being dull as Fox spends more time in conversation with his suspect sniffing for clues than moving the narrative forward to say nothing of the obvious fact that Chip has an established means of disposing of the incriminating CCTV diskette if he really wants it gone.
The suspended Fox off the book and armed and ultimately pulled into the strange gulf where time and life are suspended but choking gases remain flammable, there was only one place a film like Butt Boy was going to end up but following the structure and beats of a more conventional film it takes too long to take the plunge, the nuggets of demented brilliance too few in a gaping outflux of less inspired residue.
Butt Boy is streaming on the Arrow platform now
