A Chest Full of Dollars: The Titty Boy Review

Austin Culp’s Titty Boy is an interesting short unlike anything seen before. This isn’t to say that it was revolutionary—it's a coming-of-age comedy—but it does tackle something that I haven’t seen a movie really touch on before: gynecomastia as a condition and how it affects a high school student.

The jokes start immediately due to its outrageous concept. Trey (Anthony Ezell) searches Google to try to find a solution for his “man boobs” and his parents come in and assume he’s watching porn. He wants to get surgery to fix his condition, but his parents can’t afford it.

One day a student sees him shirtless in the locker room before gym class and offers to pay Trey to look at them and touch them. This sparks an idea in Trey’s mind: if his parents won’t pay for surgery, he’s going to grind to afford it. Hormone-laden high school boys start flocking left and right to see the sights, and Trey slowly starts to amass a small fortune. The idea alone is amusing, but it really comes together through its writing. The jokes in the movie may come off as immature, but I found them to be witty and clever.

I applaud the short because at no point does it allow you to really feel bad for Trey, instead setting you up to root for him. Sure, he’s a victim, but the condition isn’t anything that seems too life-threatening and Trey is a good kid with a good head on his shoulders. You want to see him succeed, you want him to get his surgery. Sure, the script is doing some of the work, but the acting here is doing its fair share of the heavy lifting.

Anthony Ezell shines as Trey and leans into the humor of the character in a subtle way. He isn’t given a ton of laugh-out-loud lines, but his delivery offers a pathos to the character that elevates it to another dimension from what could have just been played flatly. Anna Schatte and Joel Keith also give hilarious performances as Terri and Clay, Trey’s parents. Terri isn’t a perfect mother but she’s trying her best to be supportive of her son. Clay is a bad dad who doesn’t attempt to understand why his son feels the way he does. They both get some solid one-liners that really provide their characters a sense of realness.

Titty Boy proves director Austin Culp is capable of handling comedy, and has a sense of what works and what doesn’t. This outlandish concept could have easily fallen flat on its face, but due to all of the pieces coming together, it comes off as endearing and heartwarming. If this is just the beginning, I’m interested to see what comes next from Culp with the lessons learned from this short.