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Fantastic Fest 2019: ‘Butt Boy’ is a Hard Boiled, Bizarre Game of Cat and Mouse

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Butt

Butt Boy is a strange ride. It’s a film called Butt Boy after all, so I suppose some level of strangeness is suitable. It’s also a film that was added into Fantastic Fest’s lineup of perpetually great programming, which bodes well for any film I see there. However, the question still stood, how can one butt stuff joke hold an entire films runtime? The answer is complicated.

Butt Boy opens on schlub, Chip Gutchell caught in a dead end job with a wife that doesn’t return his affection. When he arranges for his first prostate exam, Gutchell finds that he very much enjoys shoving things up his butt. Now, while that starts as relatively small items, it ends up turning to live animals and even entire humans.

Flash forward a few years to Detective Russel Fox (Tyler Rice) who finds himself investigating mysterious disappearances that may have something to do with the before mentioned Gutchell.

Butt Boy is an obvious on the nose satire. Using its overt butt stuff to convey a big underlying message. Part of the fun of the film is getting to the center of what that message is. So, I won’t spoil that here. I will say that the entire film is played surprisingly straight. For the subject matter at hand, the whole thing comes off straight faced even in the film’s most absurd moments.

Tyler Rice does a pitch-perfect job as Detective Russel Fox adding a young Micheal Madsen approach to his overall look and delivery. The more absurd bits of narrative are grounded well by his serious approach to his character and is ultimately what makes the film work like it does.

Rice and Guchell going head to head feels almost comic book. Like, this could have been a character rejected and thrown away by Marvel. It feels very origin story, and like it is setting up for a bigger world built on a hero and his arch nemesis.

Director and Co-writer, Tyler Cornack creates a David Fincher-esque aesthetic to much of the film. Crafting a world that almost seems to suffocate in its visual representation of loneliness. Added to that are strong elements of effective cat and mouse mechanics. The whole thing works really well when combined, even in the moments when the pacing seems a bit off.

Butt Boy is Heat by way of Fincher… but with a lot more butt stuff. It’s an effective approach to something that could have been passed off as a one-off butt joke. The real magic of the picture is how Cornack is able to sustain the film’s thriller cadence for as long as he does. This of course all leading up to the most insane third acts you will see in 2019. Trust me, the third act alone is something that needs to be seen to be believed. It’s a strange title give it a looksee and judge for yourself.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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