I came across this in an article featured in Rue Morgue magazine. But it was under the name Boneboys. I’m not entirely sure why a change was made, but I’m guessing Butcher Boys fits better with the overall plot. It’s actually semi based on Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, even though it’s wrong. Swift took a satirical look at how people were treating the poor at that time. However, the writer of Texas Chainsaw Massacre took that essay literally, and here we are.
If you’re unfamiliar with that essay, Swift tells the poor to sell their children as food to the rich. Kim Henkel read that, thought it needed a more vivid (and dumb) spin, and “came up” with this. I say it that way because this is a carbon copy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Instead of a family, there’s a cross-dressing doctor, a group of junkie thugs with a brooding leader, some gay guy, and a disfigured, chained up man in the basement. They even copied the dinner scene, for crying out loud.
There’s really not much to this. It’s just running, hiding, stalking, and scenes of cracked out men eating people. What little acting there is bounces back and forth from psychotic to a poor man’s Tim Curry. Based on the picture quality, I believe the budget was only about $100. I just don’t even know what to say. The writer plagiarized himself, and managed to do a piss poor job. This gets 1 out of 5. It only gets that because it got me to laugh, even though it was supposed to be scary. Also, the leader of the junkie cannibals (Johnny Walter) was insanely hot. Yes, I did stare at him for the duration of the movie. I would’ve given it one more point, but that was until the final showdown. It made Uwe Boll look modest in comparison. When Uwe Boll is the lesser of two evils, there is something severely wrong.
The Lively Mind Reviews 