Tag Archives: Tyler Cornack

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Hard to Portmanteau

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Tiny Cinema

by Daniel Baldwin

Colloquialisms being taken to their absolute extremes. A woman struggling to find happiness in solitude. A pleasure-deprived man seeking help from his friends. Body horror ending not in goo and grue, but in dad jokes?!? Tiny Cinema is a comedic genre anthology film that wants to make you laugh and gasp in equal measure with the outrageous storytelling that it contains within. Does it succeed? Mostly.

Tiny Cinema is the latest cinematic endeavor of director/writer/actor extraordinaire Tyler Cornack and his motley crew of performers. If you’ve seen their previous effort, Butt Boy, you’re going to spot a lot of familiar faces across all six segments here. This film largely lacks that one’s Henenlotter-esque weirdness, however. It instead opts for a modern Twilight Zone vibe; offering up situations where ordinary people find their lives turned upside down by strange occurrences that are either tied to everyday problems (i.e. loneliness, sexual dysfunction, dating) or become twisted takes on everyday sayings (i.e. “That’s what she said!” and “Yo momma!”).

The results are mixed. On the positive side of things, there is a great host in the form of the quirky and deeply charismatic Paul Ford. The first three segments are also really entertaining (particularly “Bust!”). Furthermore, what really helps Tiny Cinema along is its cast. The troupe that Cornack has pooled together are all beyond game for whatever delirious nonsense he asks of them and that helps smooth over even the segments that don’t really work. They help to drive his best ideas home and make his films worth seeking out.

It’s in the back half where things begin to wobble, as the other three segments aren’t nearly as strong. Almost all anthology films have weak spots. Unevenness is par for the course with episodic storytelling. The weaker segments here are the slighter ones that just aim for shock value. Unfortunately, with them all filling out the second half of the feature, it means that it starts with a bang and ends with a bit of a whimper.

Tiny Cinema might be a step down from Butt Boy, but it’s a solid indie slice of portmanteau moviemaking. If you’re game for some weird fun, this might just be up your alley.

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Rear Window

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Butt Boy

by Matt Weiner

A killer fixated on jamming people, animals and any other object not nailed down into his rectum. The grieving detective haunted by loss and obsessed with hunting him down. Every now and then a movie comes along that seems to exist as much as an inside dare as it does to mock the complaint that there’s no original IP anymore.

If the title wasn’t ample enough warning, Butt Boy is that kind of movie. And just about every demented minute of it is a heady joy to watch. Add this to the list of sentences I wasn’t really expecting to write before going into the Butt Boy movie, but beneath the high-concept plot and anal absurdity you’ll find a pretty decent send-up of a “tortured detective” action film.

Detective Russel Fox (Tyler Rice) gets assigned the case of a missing child, his main suspect seems to have made his victim disappear into thin air in a public, crowded place. That’s because mild-mannered IT drone Chip Gutchell (Tyler Cornack, who also co-wrote and directed) does have a way of making his victims – also remote controls, beloved family pets, you name it ­– vanish without a trace. Up his butt.

In focusing on Russel and a cop noir send-up, Cornack’s script ends up being more satirical than disturbing. If anything, it would’ve been an interesting experiment to see the movie fully embrace the horror of its conceit rather than leavening it with self-referential absurdity.

Or maybe not – Butt Boy is likely a hard enough sell. The cast all do a fine job helping to sell it with deadpan line deliveries. And Cornack pulls out all the stops for a conclusion that trades on all the detective noir clichés while still managing to be truly shocking.

There’s a cosmic irony that it’s been quite a year for delirious, genre-bending movies, including Joe Begos’s VFW, and Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space. Now, we’re all stuck home for yet another uninhibited midnight movie that begs to be seen with a crowd of stoned fellow travelers who know this was made with love for people like them.

The fact that life had a different kind of horror planned shouldn’t keep you from the giddy escapism of Butt Boy, no matter how much smaller that ass will now loom on the home screen.