After Dark Horror Fest 3: Butterfly Effect: Revelation

I didn't see the first Butterfly Effect due to my severe allergies to Ashton Kutcher. (I don't know why. I barely know who the guy is. I'm probably just pissed he wouldn't do a sequel to Dude! Where's My Car?) So I don't know what, if anything, this has to do with the previous two movies.

I didn't see the second installment because I blinked.

The basic premise is that the lead character can change the past by--em--well, he time travels by sitting in a bathtub fill of ice in the dark. I gather that this is given a more plausible treatment in the first film but in this one we don't waste any time justifying it. (In fact, I think they get around it by saying he doesn't actually time travel.)

Look, the guy can time travel, let it go already. Think of it as "Quantum Leap" with gore and a gratuitous sex scene.

When the movie opens, he's doing what he does for the cops: Basically, he travels back in time to the scenes of crimes and IDs the perps. This falls within the confines of "the rules", the things you can and can't do without frying your mind or unleashing the dreaded butterfly effect.

The butterfly effect, of course, is when you make a change, however minor, to the timestream. The ripple effects from that cause massive changes in history, and in the case of this movie, the time-traveler ends up with a mashed-up memory of both timelines. (I think. It's a little hard to tell what the main character knows and doesn't know.)

So, the trouble begins when a childhood friend--the sister of his murdered girlfriend, in fact--exhorts him to use his talent (nobody knows the icy bath thing, they just know he knows stuff) to clear a wrongly accused man about to be put to death and to find the real killer.

But going back to your own life causes all kinds of problems and God help you if you change your own timeline.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Every time our hero goes back in time to right something, he wakes up in a new present with new people dead and his own life worse off than before. Before you know it, he's created a serial killer and gone from taking care of his shut-in sister (whom he saved in a previous incident but at the cost of his parents dying) to being taken care of her.

The sister, by the way, is played by Rachel Miner, who I always figure should be the daughter of horror-meister Steve Miner, but doesn't appear to be. Ms. Miner has the distinction of being the only actress I know of who has appeared in all three Horrorfests: In #1, she was the eponymous Penny Dreadful and in #2, she was in the much enjoyed Tooth and Nail.

The Boy liked this one a lot, as did I. Chris Carmack in the lead has to play an increasingly confused and unstable character, and you do feel sorry for him even if you wonder how smart he is to keep going back trying to fix stuff.

The aforementioned gratuitous sex scene is pretty funny, just because it goes on way longer than necessary, only to end with a "I guess I'm just not in the mood."

Anyway, this film does follow a nice dramatic arc, pulls you in, gives a sense of real danger, and then a pretty satisfying climax and denouement. There is a certain preposterousness to it, even accepting the time-travel stuff. The plot hinges on a looseness in "the rules" that isn't really explained or justified, and the ending is a little too neat (though with an obligatory "...or is it?" feel).

But, hey, not complaining. It was different enough and fun enough.