The Butterfly Effect ( plot spoilers)

[Neon Noodle]

Man - just got back from this one, and I gotta write this down so I can use my journals....Whoops, still pulling back to the reality zone, sorry!

The movie is pretty slow in the beginning. We get to see Ashton (Evan) go through age seven up to about age 22. As a kid, he has several "blackouts" where he can't remember what happens during a 1-2 minute period. His mother takes him to a neurologist, who suggests that he keep journals so he might remember what happened during these blackouts someday.

Several disturbing things happen to him along the way, and Kayleigh, the love of his life, but he keeps trucking on, like we all do.

Don't worry, it ramps up.

When he gets to college, one of Evan's girlfriends asks him to read out of one of his journals. He picks a segment what describes a moment before one of his blackouts. All of a sudden, the present world fades away
and he's back in that pocket of time. He doesn't know how he got there, and before too long, he's back in the present.

Evan tries this again, and while in one of those repressed memories, Evan drops a cigarette on himself and it burns through his shirt. When Evan comes back to present day, he now has a burn mark where one didn't exist before.

From this, Evan figures out that each of his childhood "blackouts" was actually the creation of a waypoint. We all have moments in our lives where we wish we could have done something different. His journals chronicle the exact events that occurred before these waypoints. He decides to go back and enter one of those memories - he picks the one where he was about to be forced to perform in a homemade porno film for Kayleigh's dad. When he gets there, Evan threatens to report Kayleigh's father to child services, and told her to tell her dad off.
After this, Evan wakes up in the present, in a different room. All of a sudden, he starts to get a splitting headache and we see his original memories getting intermingled with new ones. He is with Kayleigh, and things are different indeed.

This is about all I can say about the movie without doing a full review and giving absolutely everything away. Seeing Ashton Kutcher doing a serious role was pretty surprising - and impressive. This definitely isn't Back to the Future, and the ending was not what I expected at all.

One of those repressed memories was EXTREMELY disturbing the first time around, before Evan had the chance to change it. The scripters really didnt' pull any punches here.

Definitely DVD worthy.

[Brother Ragnarok]

Dammit, I hoped I'd get to post about this first.  The movie absolutely blew me away.  It's like getting picked up out of your seat by the throat, held against a wall, and punched in the stomach for two hours.  There need to be more movies like this, more good movies.  Not just "yeah, it was pretty cool", but "holy crap, I've never seen anything like it".  It's Donnie Darko on steroids.
Actually, they had to re-shoot a new ending.  The original, which was deemed by the MPAA to be too disturbing for theatrical release, will be on the DVD as reported by Fangoria.  And considering how brutal the rest of the movie was, I can't even imagine what the original ending will be like.

Brother R

[Chris K.]

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT does have some promise, but with dopey Ashton Kutcher in the lead role and dull pacing, it's a film that I really can't recommend. Maybe it would have been better if Dario Argento directed it. It's a shame, because Dario would have made it look wonderful.