That’s some title, am I right? But if you like the moniker, then the premise is bound to draw you in even further. Our lead character, Chip Gutchel, is a man stuck in a dead-end middle-management IT job, led by an unbearably chipper manager, and rather marooned in an unhappy marriage and home life.

Oh, and he is currently on a crazed spree of shoving anything he chooses up his ass.

Goddamn it, I loved this movie.

The main focus of the plot is Gutchel’s relationship with Detective Fox, a broken police detective who turns up to Chip’s AA group. It’s not long before Chip is Fox’s sponsor, but he doesn’t do much of a job of it – as Fox continues to decline Gutchel is mostly wrapped up in his bizarre anal rampage, putting a host of household items (and even the family dog) where the sun doesn’t shine. However when ‘bring your child to work day’ rolls around at Chip’s office, he can’t resist the temptation to lose something a bit bigger in that cavity. And his problems only get worse when Fox is assigned to the case of the missing child, and a surreal game of cat and mouse is on.

The tension between these two central characters is great, led by solid performances – director Tyler Cornack doubles as a lead actor for Chip, and does a strong job as a downtrodden man hiding a horrible secret. Tyler Rice does a fine job as Fox, who is maybe a little too much every other cop from any other movie, but delivers the stranger elements of the movie with gusto. Shelby Dash also puts in a solid stint as Anne Gutchel, and the issues in the marriage bubble away in a way that is believable, especially as Chip’s life gradually begins to unravel.

The movie is pretty gross in places – particularly in its second half – but generally builds pretty steadily, showing plenty of the home life of both characters and what led them to the situation they find themselves in. You feel a certain sympathy for both of them. By doing this, the movie – which could have been a little vapid – is actually surprisingly deep and warm. Wait, maybe that’s not the best choice of words here…

The point there stands though – there’s far more to this movie than just shock value, and as well as its emotional story there’s plenty of laughs too. The humour is plenty dark but it does have a number of hilarious moments, and often calls upon the utter weirdness of its central conceit for incidents that might make you smile wryly too. It also has a great finale which is well worth sticking around for!

It’s hard to know quite what to compare Butt Boy to – I’ve seen some people draw a line between this and The Greasy Strangler, but that doesn’t quite work for me. I feel like this has a lot more heart, or maybe just more meaning to it, and is at large a cleverer and more watchable movie to me. I’d dare to go so far as to say it’s one of the quirkiest and most interesting films I’ve seen in a long time, and probably the best thing I’ve seen in 2020 so far. It’s not long been released, so if you can get hold of this wherever you are and you like your horror/comedy distinctly off the wall, this should nicely kill another 100 minutes of lockdown…

RATING: 9.5/10. I was drawn in by the frankly bonkers idea behind this one, but what kept me watching was the interesting characters and the relationships between them and the fact I never quite knew where this one was going – even until the very final scene. It’s weird, it’s fun, and it might just ‘hit you in the feels’ when you least expect it. Ultimately it combines together a lot of what I like, including one of the most prized things for me – a great streak of originality. This sits right at the top of the charts for me – in fact it’s nowhere near the bottom… (sorry, couldn’t resist one final pun!)

There’s always a little reticence on my part to approach this sort of film. Not because there’s something specifically disturbing about the ‘kidnapped person trapped in cage’ trope that permeates through horror, but it’s so tried and true that it’s hard to do with that much originality. It can work well – I can think of a handful of interesting entries, with Oldboy being an obvious standout. The trope itself can even work if done well, with strong performances.

Cage gives itself away with the title, and you’re pretty set from the get-go with what you’re getting into. Our main (and basically only character) is Gracie Blake, and the difficulties of her life are laid out as a series or phone calls that play throughout the credits. Not enough money to go around, her child living elsewhere (although it’s never really specified what that situation is) and a life she hates in taking phone calls for a sex line. In a desperate moment, she accepts an offer of $5000 to meet one of her regular callers – a terrible idea of course, as she wakes up in a near-empty room chained to and locked within a cage.

It’s effectively a one-woman performance, as while there are some conversations and interactions they’re all on the phone. Lucy-Jane Quinlan carries it pretty well, but it’s so hard to deliver something like this without it falling down in a place or two. Her kidnapper, Peter, is some sort of businessman who jets all over the country, who leaves her phone in her possession (??) so she can contact her boyfriend, her mother and ultimately of course the police – despite instructions not to do so. Peter leaves her enough food and drink to live on, along with toilet roll and a bucket, implying to Gracie that there’s some reason that she’s there that he will reveal in time.

To be fair there are plenty of twists and turns, enough to keep you guessing, although I would have to say that not all of them absolutely land – in fact one or two events are sadly a bit frustrating and rather jarred my suspension of disbelief. With these films that sense of reality is pivotal, and Cage breaks it more than is comfortable. Some of the side actors – despite only being on the phone – are not always believable, and there are also a number of other smaller niggles that I won’t detail here for risk of spoiling it. In my mind some of those less significant elements added up to a rather bigger problem – there was a sense of convenience to the plot, things happening in a certain way at a certain time that were a little too coincidental.

As I said up front, the ‘person (mostly women, to be honest) kidnapped and held against their will’ isn’t my favourite subgenre, but I always try and go into a movie with an open mind. This is not the best example of the field, despite some promising ideas – unfortunately all too often it fails to deliver on the concepts it has, and a likeable lead performance is slightly undermined by the plot and sometimes the script. You might want to visit this one if you consider yourself an afficionado of this particular field, but it didn’t hold my attention captive as it might have.

RATING: 4/10. I think with the sorts of subgenres you either have to do it really well, or deliver something different and original – and sadly Cage doesn’t really deliver on either of those fronts. I tip my hat to Lucy-Jane Quinlan, who basically spend all the screen time on her own, in a good effort to carry this particular vehicle. But it loses its way in a few places and there are some questionable decisions in the plot sense, so I have to come in with a slightly below-average grade.

If I were to describe Necro Files 3000 as a few guys dicking around with action figures, you might think that I meant that in a bad way.

But I don’t – not in the least.

This movie is a follow-up (of sorts) from 1997’s The Necro Files and The Necro Files 2, which came out six years later. Full disclosure – I’ve not seen either of those films, so precisely how they all tie together is a little lost on me. But I don’t think the first two featured any action figures either way.

The story is slim, but does exist – we open with a couple (a clown toy and a Barbie doll, to be precise) being terrorised by a crazed zombie cannibal that escapes for their TV screen and kills them both. The creature proceeds to go on a rampage, and the only people that can stop it are hardened occult expert Professor Blackthorn and his new companion, investigative journalist Phineas Hogweather. Phineas pokes at the darker elements of Blackthorn’s past, while the professor is unwilling to believe that the zombie menace – Logan – is loose again. But when they catch Logan killing a camgirl (that’s a weird scene) they know they have to act to stop the undead menace.

It’s obvious that everyone involved is having immense fun, and also pretty apparent that this one was made for nothing or next to nothing. I say the characters are action figures, but there’s nothing stop motion a la Robot Chicken (the method is facetiously called Superpuppettronimation in the very opening frame). It is literally two guys holding the toys as the characters move around, and I could understand if this maybe puts some viewers off – it looks silly because it is. If you could imagine a rather more primitive version of Team America: World Police you might be about in the right ballpark.

For all that, the enthusiasm of all involved was infectious to me, and the sense of humour here coincided with mine very nicely. The scene in which the characters repeatedly enter the wrong room looking for the camgirl was a stitch, and the movie commonly pokes fun at the absurdity of the ‘action figures as characters’ premise in a way that is plenty self-aware. Things take a deeply weird twist towards the end as Killbot 3000 and the Electronic Detective come in (not a toy I’ve heard of, but it might ring a bell for some of you!) I think basically it will just boil down to if you find this to your taste comedically – it entertained me, and made me laugh a number of times, and with that in mind I’m willing to forgive plenty that I might have been a stickler about had it less tickled my funny bone.

This one is barely over an hour long, and if you like macabre humour and a bit of puppet absurdity this could be worth you investing the time on. I’ll say something I’ve often said at Film Gutter in that ‘it won’t be for everybody’, and honestly you’ll probably get a sense within five minutes if you’re in the yay or nay camp here. I believe the first two movies are a bit more straight zombie movies/slashers, but if they have the same minds behind it as this one I might just have to go back and check those out too.

RATING: 7/10. I can’t go overboard – there’s only so far you can go with waving action figures around, and Necro Files 3000 probably does it about as well as is possible. There’s plenty that made me laugh, and the plot was quirky and took off in all sorts of strange directions throughout – and that absurdity helped things along for sure. I’ve always had a penchant for movies with energy and enthusiasm – for me that can go a long way towards replacing higher budgets – and this definitely fell into that category. There’s nothing particularly deep, or cutting, or insightful, but it was fun – not something I often get to say with these particular reviews…