When the Meat Goes Bad
Butcher Boys wants to be a raw, shocking commentary on modern society—a grotesque feast of satire and savagery served with Texas barbecue flair. What it actually is, though, is a lukewarm pile of cinematic leftovers that taste like they’ve been left out in the San Antonio sun.
Written and produced by Kim Henkel—the co-creator of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—this film arrives with pedigree. Unfortunately, it plays less like a spiritual successor to that masterpiece and more like a bootleg sequel filmed in a haunted Chili’s.
Directed by Duane Graves and Justin Meeks, Butcher Boys (originally titled Boneboys, because why not make it sound like a forgotten 1990s boy band) tries to update Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal into a modern cannibal nightmare. It’s a clever idea in theory. In practice, it’s like someone read the essay while on Red Bull and decided to film a car chase.
The Plot: “You Are What You Eat,” But You’ll Wish You Weren’t
The story begins with a group of well-dressed Texas twenty-somethings celebrating a birthday at a fancy San Antonio restaurant. They drink, they flirt, they act like they’ve never had a line reading before. On their way home, they cross paths with a gang of street cannibals known as the Boneboys.
From that point on, chaos reigns. There’s screaming, running, and more screaming. The Boneboys chase the group through back alleys, slaughterhouses, and abandoned buildings, because apparently cannibals have excellent real estate connections.
It’s supposed to be terrifying, but it’s mostly confusing. The tone swings between grindhouse horror and unintentional comedy, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre if it were directed by someone who just discovered Monster Energy drinks and slow motion.
By the time the final act rolls around, the movie abandons any pretense of plot and just starts throwing blood and nonsense at the screen. Someone gets eaten. Someone else screams “Nooo!” in a way that sounds like a dial-up modem. You start to wonder if the real victims are the audience.
The Characters: Meat Puppets With Dialogue
Our main character, Sissy (Ali Faulkner), is the kind of horror heroine who looks great covered in blood but has the survival instincts of a houseplant. She’s joined by a collection of friends who range from “forgettable” to “actively annoying.” Benny (Derek Lee Nixon) tries to be the cool one. Barbie (Tory Taranova) screams a lot. The rest exist mostly to fill out the menu.
On the villain side, we have the Boneboys—cannibals with names like Bossboy, Amphead, and Caesar. They look like a gang of roadies who got lost on their way to a Limp Bizkit concert. They’re supposed to be terrifying, but they mostly come across as sweaty dudes who overcommit to their community theater gigs.
Bossboy (Johnny Walter) does his best to inject menace, but it’s hard to take him seriously when he’s spouting dialogue that sounds like it was written by a middle schooler after reading The Road.
There’s also a subplot involving older, wealthier cannibals who buy human meat from the Boneboys, which could have been interesting if the movie hadn’t forgotten about it halfway through. By the end, everyone’s just running, yelling, and bleeding.
The Tone: Somewhere Between Grindhouse and Goofy
The biggest problem with Butcher Boys is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it satire? Horror? Comedy? Social commentary? Yes—just not competently.
Henkel claims it’s inspired by Swift’s essay about eating the poor, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any real satire beneath the splatter. The only “commentary” is that rich people are bad and cannibals are worse. That’s less “Swiftian wit” and more “obvious statement.”
The film’s tone lurches from serious horror to ridiculous farce with the grace of a drunk cannibal slipping on a rib bone. One moment, someone’s getting butchered in gritty realism. The next, a character is cracking a joke that sounds like it was cut from a bad Scream sequel.
It’s as if the directors couldn’t decide whether to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 or Scary Movie 7, so they just split the difference and called it “vision.”
The Look and Feel: Grease, Grime, and Grating Editing
Visually, the movie tries hard to look gritty. Everything’s covered in grime, sweat, and questionable lighting choices. The cinematography is the kind of shaky handheld chaos that makes you long for a tripod. You can practically feel the camera operator breathing heavily behind the lens.
The editing, meanwhile, is frantic enough to induce whiplash. Scenes jump from one location to another with no sense of geography or pacing. It’s less “intense horror” and more “student film with a Red Bull sponsorship.”
And the color palette—dear god, the color palette. Everything looks like it’s been dipped in barbecue sauce and regret. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a greasy paper plate after a Fourth of July cookout.
The Dialogue: Raw and Undercooked
The script feels like it was written by someone who’s seen a lot of horror movies but never actually understood one. Characters shout things like, “They’re gonna eat us!” and “Run!” as if they’re auditioning for a parody.
There are attempts at philosophical moments—references to hunger, survival, and “the food chain”—but they land with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. By the third “you are what you eat” joke, you’ll wish you weren’t watching what you’re watching.
Even the cannibals’ dialogue, which could have been an opportunity for real menace, is reduced to grunts and vague threats. It’s like someone rewrote Deliverance after binge-watching Jackass.
The Gore: Gristle Without Guts
You’d think a movie about cannibalism would at least deliver on the gore, but even that feels half-hearted. There’s plenty of blood, sure, but it’s shot so chaotically that you can’t tell what’s happening. It’s all flash cuts and red goo, like someone spilled ketchup on the camera.
When the violence does land, it’s more gross than frightening. There’s no sense of tension, no build-up—just people getting hurt for the sake of it. It’s horror without suspense, cruelty without consequence.
And if the point was to make us queasy, mission accomplished—but only because of how poorly lit everything is.
The Spirit of Chainsaw, Missing in Action
The saddest part of Butcher Boys is that it’s written by Kim Henkel—the same man who co-created one of the greatest horror films ever made. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was raw, terrifying, and genuinely subversive. Butcher Boys feels like a knockoff made by someone who skimmed the Wikipedia summary.
Where Chainsaw was gritty realism, this is cartoonish chaos. Where Chainsaw said something about America’s decay, Butcher Boys says nothing beyond, “Look! Meat!” It’s as if Henkel wanted to recapture lightning in a bottle but ended up microwaving leftovers instead.
Final Verdict: One Star and a Stomachache
Butcher Boys is what happens when smart ideas meet bad execution and everyone decides to chew on the results anyway. It’s a messy, noisy, directionless horror film that confuses chaos for tension and cannibalism for commentary.
It wants to be The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the new millennium, but it ends up as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Buffet Edition.
If you’re hungry for horror, skip this one. Watch the original Chainsaw again—or heck, even Cannibal Holocaust. At least those movies had bite.
Butcher Boys, meanwhile, is all gristle and no flavor.
Verdict: ★☆☆☆☆ — A movie so bad it might turn you vegan.
