THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT:
(Or time-traveling in the land of nightmares and dreams)

This is the dark and unnerving Ashton Kutcher film about a guy who can go back in time to the incredibly traumatic periods of his childhood and try to change them for the better. But each time he changes something it causes something else to change drastically. Kind of like that Simpson episode where Homer keeps messing stuff up with his home-made time-machine or that Ray Bradbury story where that dinosaur hunter steps on the butterfly.

What's that? You hate Ashton Kutcher? It doesn't matter, he doesn't show up till 1/4 of the way into the film and by then you'll be like, "What the hell is this? Who the hell made this? This is one of the most twisted things I've ever seen!!" Oh yeah..it's like they collected every twisted nightmare they could, all the ways a person's life could go horribly wrong and built them into this picture. Every time he tries to fix something in his past something, else goes horribly, horribly wrong. Like John Constantine constantly creating a hell around him in the comic book "Hellblazer" whenever he tries to do something good. His friends keep suffering.

Am I building this up too much now? Don't worry. I won't say anything more about the details of the film. The fun is in the watching and in the knowledge that anything can happen to any one of the characters at any time. We see the good and the bad. Any character is capable of cold, unnerving cruelty or of incredibly touching kindheartedness. No one is truly good or truly bad, they're what the world has made them. (Or what Kutcher's character has made them.)

The movie shines in it's willingness to take chances. In fact, it seems obsessed with pushing the limits of emotional endurance. (People can endure a lot, they try to keep going on no matter how much it hurts. There's something admirable about that.) But it's a nightmare to think that every thing you do effects everyone eles's life in some negative way despite your best intentions. So yeah, I love this movie.

It takes the things that make people go catatonic or grow up maladjusted and wraps it all up in a wickedly skewed presentation. Like a bouquet of nightmares held out by a demented pixie. Beautifully ghoulish. And dammit if it isn't one of the best psychological horror films to come out in a long, long time. It takes the idea of therapy and skews it in a fantastically, outlandish way. All the main character is doing is trying to fix his life by dealing with the traumas in his childhood. It's all there in his journals. He just wants to be able to live a happy, safe life with his childhood sweetheart. But no matter what he does, it all goes to hell.

Special note.On one side of the DVD is the theatrical release. But flip it and you get the director's cut with a whole different ending and a bunch of crucially different scenes. Both versions have very good endings. both are very effective. So even if you saw it in the theater like Tammy and Chan and I did, it's worth seeing the new cut and it's definitely a blast listening to the hilariously offbeat commentary of the writer/director team. It was their first directing effort and they gleefully tell all their trials and tribulations. This one was their "baby". They were working for about 7 years trying to get this vision realized. This was the project they crafted while they worked on other projects like "Final Destination 2". This was very near and dear to their heart. It was their way of dealing with the darkness of the world and their tribute to friends who had suffered through some very heavy-duty stuff.

This is not a horror film to be easily dismissed like "House of the Dead" or some "Friday the 13th" film. This one rewards on repeat viewings. You start to see very subtle and complex things in the characters based on what happened to them in each different reality. Everyone worked very hard on this film. They did a great job. But it's definitely not for the casual, everyday moviegoer.
This one's special.