There's an old Cheech & Chong bit from the 1970s about a guy who takes his kid to the doctor because the kid keeps shoving things up his nose. (Turns out, I'm reminded that it trafficked in stereotypical tropes, which hadn't triggered my teenage sensitivities back then, and it ended with the vaudevillian one-liner "Keep the change." We won't link to it.)
The point is, it being 2021, the stakes for such crude humor are much higher now -- or should we say much lower? Exhibit A is "Butt Boy," in which our anti-hero, Chip Gutchell (writer-director Tyler Cornack) has a surprisingly enjoyable experience undergoing a prostate exam and celebrates his newfound joy by grabbing anything he can find and sticking them up his butt. Yes, that's the plot of a movie in this day and age. And ol' Chip doesn't just round up the usual suspects to indulge in anal gratification. In fact, you'd be quite surprised at what he can fit up there -- not just the TV remote but also small dogs and children.
If you were to bail out right there, I wouldn't blame you. I might have been better off diving for the remote after all of that is revealed in the first 10 minutes. I could have turned it off and filed a succinct essay under the Life Is Short umbrella. And yet, I persisted. Not that I'm proud.
So, the movie jumps ahead nine years, and Chip is still stuck in a loveless marriage, and he's in Alcoholics Anonymous, where he gets recruited to serve as a sponsor to a hard-drinking police detective, Russel (a ham-chewing Tyler Rice), who pines for an ex and seems to harbor a dark secret or two of his own. The two men find their anonymous world spill out into the open when Russel is called in to investigate the disappearance of Chip's co-worker's son during take-your-kid-to-work day at the office. (It was a mistake, during a game of hide-and-seek, to hide under Chip's desk. You think you've had to deal with anal-retentive co-workers? Wait till you meet Chip!)
This whole thing is not only ridiculous but fairly disgusting. (The trail of the investigation will lead -- literally -- up Chip's ass.) So why not turn it off and brand it with an F? Because there's almost something admirable to Cornack's devotion to the absurd premise.
It's almost as if Cornack and co-writer Ryan Koch were dying for the opportunity to make their own detective movie -- maybe they were fans of the noir classics of Phillip Marlowe or old westerns -- and some movie executive, just to be rid of these pests, concocted the stupidest plot device they could think of just to toy with them. In my imagined scenario, Cornack and Koch take that dare and they say, "A movie where the bad guy hides all the victims and evidence up his butt? I'll see your crazy idea and raise you this otherwise conventional script starring a love-starved husband and a hard-drinking detective with some secret scores to settle!"
And they did it. Aside from that inane premise which permeates the entire film, "Butt Boy" is a conventional, borderline cliched whodunnit. Replace a man's anal cavity as the stash house with, say, an old barn in the woods, and cast Ryan Gosling in the role of the brooding, boozing cop, and you might have a mainstream hit on your hands.
To me, that's the true takeaway from this exercise. Two filmmakers had a story to tell, and they knocked out a script, raised some financing, rounded up a cast of pretty good actors, and shot it and edited it. They had a vision, and they realized it. Their vision was an incredibly stupid one, but yet ...
They persisted. They accomplished something, rather than just sit around feeling sorry for themselves with their thumbs up their ass.
GRADE for 'BUTT BOY': C-minus
* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films,
cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.
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