Director Tyler Cornack returns to Arrow Video FrightFest with more weird and warped tales. The brain responsible for 2020 Glasgow offering Butt Boy, his latest project, Tiny Cinema, features several new stories to tantalise the senses.
With Tiny Cinema Cornack creates his own anthology movies. Too often in the modern horror landscape the anthology format is an easy way of stitching together several shorts from different voices. The end result is usually a mixed bag of muddled stories. One or two occasionally stand out, but the rest are forgotten. They work to get new filmmakers in front of audiences, but often lack a sense of cohesion. As Ryan Spindell’s The Mortuary Collection proved, sometimes having just one person in the directing chair can work better. It certainly does for Cornack and Tiny Cinema. The production affords Cornack the opportunity to showcase that he’s more than just someone who made a film called Butt Boy. Each segment is different tonally or visually to the one before, the complete project acting as an extended showreel. That there were three writers (both Ryan Koch and William Morean assisting Coranck) helps generate the sensation that the sections have been made by different people. Cornack’s range is remarkable and effortlessly switches between his different stories.
Tiny Cinema consists of six short pieces, many linked by a brief intro from a pseudo host. This host opens the movie with some stark warnings. “This is the kind of place that’s going to make you feel uncomfortable. I can guarantee that,” he remarks. It’s both a threat and a promise, a caution for some and an endorsement for others. The figure continues, “you may get offended, that’s the whole point” and is the final chance to avert your eyes. In contrast to these words, Game Night begins the sexuplet fairly tamely. It chronicles the descent into madness of one man after he seeks the answer to one of the universe’s greatest mysteries; who is the she that said that? It’s silly and kooky and a simple and gentle entry point.
Immediately after Game Night comes Edna, a stylised story of a lonely woman’s search for love. The titular Edna finds her dream partner in rather unusual circumstances and is the first of the group to embrace the taboo side of life. Bust! offers a fluid-heavy story of the bonds of male friendships as a trio determine to get one of them the happy ending they’ve been denied. In this section Cornack opens the door to the wacky, just a crack, only for the proceeding Deep Impact to explode the door to dust. Having previously been firmly in a horror environment, the tone then shifts to a more sci-fi mode as a delivery man encounters his future self. This future self has need of some personal assistance from his younger self and it’s likely that this section, and Edna, will be responsible for the foreshadowed offence. Of the final two sections, the penultimate one, Motherfuckers, is super short with some little nods to the gangster genre. The final story, Daddy’s Home, is a whirl through body horror as a man begins to change after a very bad date.
Helping Cornack keep his varied stories and ideas sewn together is a brilliant score by Feathers. Although each entry differs to those that it shares screen time with, the music blends together fifties rockabilly with futuristic synths to create an audio world befitting of the strange stories unfolding. As anthologies go, Tiny Cinema is a strong addition. The use of a single creative controller enables an easy through-line through the piece and a vital sense of cohesion. As with Cornack’s Butt Boy, Tiny Cinema won’t be to everyone’s tastes. Though with the exception of one or two of these shorter stories, nothing within pushes quite as hard as his previous film, which potentially opens up Cornack to a new wave of admirers.
Tiny Cinema
Summary
A cohesive collection of crazy stories that befuddle, amuse, and walk the tightrope of taste, Tiny Cinema is a strong example of how to make a singular-voiced anthology work well.
Tiny Cinema was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2022.
