This is so Scooby-Doo, isn’t it?
Main Cast: Chris Carmack, Rachel Miner
Director: Seth Grossman
Each year there are movies produced that are never seen by the public. Their content is considered too graphic, too disturbing, too shocking for general audiences. This is one of those films.
Actually, that’s not true. I mean, it IS pretty graphic in a few scenes, but the reason this didn’t get a theatrical release isn’t because of that. It went straight to DVD because THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS is another in a long line of Hollywood movies that perform well enough in theaters to merit a sequel, but don’t perform well enough to merit another theatrical release. See also the plethora of CHILDREN OF THE CORN sequels, or even the lesser-known MIMIC series. So anyway, the first BUTTERFLY EFFECT was pretty cool, made a “serious” actor out of Ashton Kutcher, and put Eric Stoltz back on the big screen. The plot threw logic out the window, but it was stylish and new and so let’s keep making more of them. So what if they all suck. Honestly, having never seen the second BUTTERFLY EFFECT I can’t really say if they all suck. But I have my suspicions.
BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS isn’t a horrible movie, by any means. I mean, it’s probably as good as any movie can be when it involves something as complex as time travel and changing history and whatnot, and doing it in only 90 minutes (so says the DVD box, but this movie was over at 80 minutes, with 10 minutes of credits).
Sam Reide (Chris Carmack) is working with the police as a consultant. They give him a case file, he travels back in time to observe, gives the cops enough information to make a positive ID and a strong case, they pay him, he goes home.
It’s a decent life, it gives him enough money to pay his sister Jenna’s (Rachel Miner) bills and still maintain his own apartment. One night a woman shows up at Sam’s door, claiming to be the sister of Sam’s dead girlfriend from a decade before. The man accused of killing her is scheduled for execution, but the sister, Elizabeth, has found new evidence to support the “killer’s” claim that he and the victim had a relationship. Probably not the thing you bring to the dead girl’s boyfriend, but Elizabeth says she heard Sam is able to help the police with unsolved crimes, and maybe he could do something with this new evidence, keep an innocent man from being killed.
Reluctantly Sam agrees, eventually, and travels back to the night his girlfriend Rebecca was murdered. Unfortunately, when Sam returns to 2009, he discovers he’s somehow created a serial killer, the Pontiac Killer, who has now taken seven more victims.
Sam starts making more and more jumps, desperate to catch the killer in the act, but it seems each time he jumps, he changes things just enough so that his sister is more sane and self-sufficient, Sam is more reliant on her charity (letting him sleep on her couch and trying to find him a job), and the police are more and more certain Sam might be the Pontiac Killer. In fact, they’re so insistent on it, the viewer begins to question if maybe he is, too. After all, Jenna tells him the jumping could be affecting his mind, maybe some future version of himself has lost it and become a killer.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with the story. It’s just a murder mystery with a side of time travel and I can dig that, but the thing that I kept asking myself through this movie is how does Sam get from place to place. If 2009 Sam jumps back into 2000, he’s jumping back into his 2000 self. I can understand that 2000 Sam would be able to hop over to his girlfriend’s house to try and prevent her murder. But when 2009 Sam jumps back to try to prevent the next murder, victim #3, where is he jumping back to? What if 2001 Sam wasn’t even in town when the third victim bought it? He’s jumping back into his former self–as shown by 2000 Sam’s long hair and stocking cap, and child Sam watching the police detective he works with meet his wife for the first time– but every other time he jumps back, he looks like 2009 Sam, dressed like 2009 Sam. It’s just a big gaping hole I don’t think was taken into consideration, or if it was, was ignored for the sake of cutting the movie down to 80 minutes. Or maybe I’m just thinking too much about it.
The cast is decent enough. Carmack is a decent Sam, plays his role of what’s going on and how do I fix it pretty well, while Miner does what Miner does: straddles that line between sane and insane in a slightly manic, but trying to maintain control kind of way. She was much more believable in PENNY DREADFUL, that’s for sure.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS was written by Holly Brix, with direction from Seth Grossman. Brix, who had zero writing credits to her name before this, provides an adequate script, although it’s nothing special. Her dialogue is all right without falling into the normal trap of clichéd horror crap, no one got on their knees and screamed up at the sky, “NOOOOOO!!!!!!!”, but the reveal at the end was, wow, pretty bad.
Grossman’s work is pretty straightforward. He uses the same time travel effects the first movie introduced, the shaky background with focus on the character. I think some really ridiculous choices were made for the Pontiac Killer, everything from wardrobe to weapon of choice, and the kill scenes were absolutely overdone for the sake of the gore, and it was all unnecessary. The story, the mystery, were strong enough we didn’t need that to distract us or get our attention.
Overall, this movie was the very definition of mediocre. A retread concept from a movie that had enough problems of its own, actors who weren’t immediately recognizable but look sort of familiar anyway. There’s nothing at all unique about the way BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS was filmed, shot, staged, scored, or anything else, it’s just another movie, and will be quickly forgotten by anyone who sees it.
Read more 8 Films to Die For reviews
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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