FrightFest review – Tiny Cinema

Tiny Cinema

Tyler Cornack’s remarkable feature Butt Boy is an expansion of several episodes of his scurrilous series of Youtube short shorts, Tiny Cinema (there are 82 episodes of this thing, made between 2016-2018).  This anthology movie takes the same dark route to the rear entrance – hosted by a sinister little man who keeps popping up in places where (usually) men make bad decisions or undergo transformative sexual humiliations.  Like Butt Boy, the point is to verge on the offensive and sometimes plunge straight in – the stories are ‘Game Night’ (which oddly quotes The Silence of the Lambs), ‘Edna’ (with a rare female lead, a necro-romance, a Re-Animator re-agent and a plot that riffs on Some Call It Loving), ‘Bust’ (a heist scenario with a cum-shot), ‘Deep Impact’ (kind of a Roald Dahl sort of thing with a slacker deliveryman, a time travel yarn and that only-by-gay-sex-can-the-universe-be-preserved subtext seen also in Glorious), Motherfuckers (a mob poker game which doesn’t play out like Goodfellas) and Daddy’s Home (a blind date goes great – only an offer of cocaine has weird side-effects when the girl tells the guy he’s just snorted her Dad’s ashes).  The stories don’t all benefit from being told at more length than in the Youtube one-minuters and the attempt not to have them all fall into the set-up/punchline scenario makes a few of them feel unfinished as the narrator hurries on to the next shocker (‘well, that was fun’).  But Cornack has a great eye (he also appears in various roles, usually as a loser schlub) and the visuals are always elegant and strange, matching the seriously skewed ideas.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.