Fly Away, Fly Far, Far Away

Back in 2003, I snuck into the opening of The Butterfly Effect for the sole purpose of watching the trailer for the Dawn of the Dead remake. For whatever reason, I decided to make the most of my crime and was surprised at how much I enjoyed the film. While it's not a masterpiece of modern horror, it had a fresh premise and explored its possibilities with a certain earnestness.

The idea of turning it into a franchise was quite promising. The very nature of butterfly effects gives you endless opportunities to explore, much in the way the Final Destination series had free reign over using any disaster. A person discovers that he or she can go back in time and change the past but has no real idea of what future that can bring. GREAT! How about a politician not making a decision that begins a war, a detective stopping a serial killer before the first murder, heck, even a bartender not letting an inebriated customer fatally drive home. There's a LOT of ground to explore.

So let's pick the most boring human being alive and spend 90 minutes with his career woes instead.

Quick Plot: Nick is a blandly attractive twentysomething in love with his girlfriend and married to his job. You would be too if said job was "salesman for a startup technology company."

So let's pause right there to consider the first fatal flaw of The Butterfly Effect 2. With a premise that gives a film ample opportunity to explore the many paths one's life could take, why, why dear god did we decide to start with the dullest character imaginable? Look, I have nothing against salespeople, but does anyone looking for a unique horror movie want a movie about them? Especially when he's a blandly attractive twentysomething whose only definitive character trait is, well, being a blandly attractive twentysomething?

Anyway, Nick, his girlfriend, and their two friends are enjoying a peaceful camping trip until a work call from Nick's super interesting startup company leads to a hasty and fatal car accident. Nick recovers alone and in a depressed state, learns that he can go back in time and change past decisions using photographs.

Oh, it also helps when you google such specific topics as "dreams."

Having butterfly effected his way to a living girlfriend, Nick is now annoyed with his SUPER IMPORTANT STARTUP COMPANY and how his smarmy supervisor rules with a bratty fist. Naturally, Nick butterfly effects again in a way that leads to a big promotion and the yuppie lifestyle any blandly attractive twentysomething craves.

Guys, I'm serious: this is what the movie is about.

There are loan sharks, sort of. There's a surly boss. Another car accident. Public bathroom sex. A fairly offensive gay gangster. Nick’s girlfriend has dark hair at one point. His mom visits. 

This is the movie.

Look, not every film needs to be about superheroes or Holocaust survivors or vampire hunters or minorities. I get that. But when you make the whitest movie imaginable with the whitest cast of milennial yuppies you can gather in a selfie, you have made me a very, very angry woman. I haven’t even mentioned the bizarre ending choice to have a character just (SPOILER ALERT, but you really shouldn’t care) drive off a cliff when there were just a dozen or so other ways he could have solved the situation. If that wasn’t enough, Nick is apparently reincarnated as his own baby. The less I think about that plot point the happier I am.

And just in case it hadn't succeeded in wasting my time, The Butterfly Effect 2 then Leprechaun: Origins'd its credit sequence to pad out its 71 minute running time with nearly 15 minutes of repeated imagery from the film. By that point, I realized I would have been far better off just rewatching Leprechaun: Origins. 

High Points

They made a sequel to The Butterfly Effect!

Low Points

It was this movie

Lessons Learned

Don’t drive like an idiot and you won’t have to butterfly effect your life into a boring mess

80 percent of all startups fail in their first two years

80 percent of all startups fail in their first two years

80 percent of all startups fail in their first two years

Did you get that? Because the movie REALLY wants to make sure you did

Rent/Bury/Buy

Some viewers gave The Purge a hard time for providing such a great and innovative concept for a horror movie and filling it with a standard and trite home invasion narrative. I strongly defend that film for starting small, knowing it could further develop and explore its premise in subsequent sequels (and you've seen The Purge: Anarchy, you know that they wasted no time going bigger...and maybe too much so). But f$ck The Butterfly Effect 2. This is a movie that already had the ground work of its somewhat unusual premise set. It could have used that to explore ANYTHING. And it chose to focus on the blandest of bland white guys doing the blandest of bland white guy things. Unless you're REALLY into startup business politics, this is a true waste of 90 minutes. Purge it.  

Lottos and Torture and Boars, Oh My!

The time has come.

Kind of.

On May 23rd, the world said goodbye to something very special. Scoff at unexplained physics, the mere presence of Nikki & Paulo, and the weekly questioning of “Why are you telling me this?” but for six years, LOST gave us a weekly viewing experience unlike anything else ever seen on television.

So how to fill that Hurley-sized void in your Island-less heart? One way ticket to Hawaii? Pricey. Enlistment in the Dharma Initiative? Perilous. New career as a con man/spinal surgeon/fertility doctor/rock star/protector of golden light? There has to be an easier way!

And naturally, there is and all you need are a few great horror movies. So dear Islanders and Tailies, Sideways inhabitants and Others, I give you a few key elements of your favorite ABC show and how you might fill them.

1. Terry O’Quinn

Even Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof couldn't let go of one of the industry’s longest underrated actors, a bald and enigmatic presence so vital to the universe that he took on a whole new role as Evil (maybe) Incarnate in the final two, post-dead John Locke seasons. So where does one go for that sparking blue-eyed smile that never quite feels right? The late 80s, naturally. In 1987’s The Stepfather (and its first sequel), O’Quinn plays--wait, who is he again? We’ll call him Jerry, the name he takes to woo a lovely widow and later, attempt to kill her and the family she has left. By far the second best way to see this charmer wield an oversized knife.

2. Torture

Sayid, you scamp! From the Iraqi National Guard to Sawyer’s fingernails, everyone’s favorite curly-haired loveboat was quite the expert when it came to inflicting pain. Life won’t quite be the same without his sad puppy dog eyes seeking validation or that petite Benjamin Linus accepting that sweaty fist in his cheek, but thanks to the 21st century trend of torture porn, you can at least pretend their spirits live on. Sure, you could go standard and find a cheap boxed set of Saw or Hostel, but why not make like Charles Widmore sipping aged scotch and go classy with the philosophical genre twisting Martyrs. Yes, you’ll have to read subtitles (unless you decide to wait for the American remake, brought to you by the people who made Twilight which is sure to be the best thing you can possibly ever in your life witness) and yes, the film isn’t for everyone, but much like Lost, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs takes viewers on an ambiguous, poetic, and post-death journey (maybe) that happens to be accompanied by a whole lot of blood and beatings.

3. Crazy French Woman Trying to Steal Your Baby

Danielle Rousseau, we hardly knew ye, but one thing we were sure of was just how much you missed your little girl. Left alone for 16 years with nothing but surprisingly tame bangs and a rifle, this shipwrecked mother wanted nothing more than her child back in her arms...even if (briefly), she had to take someone else’s. Where to find that special mother with a hole in her heart? Easy: Inside. Beatrice Dalle’s La Femme. Basically, it’s the same exact thing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

4. Surgeons Under the Influence

From Jack’s shaky pain medicated hands to his dad’s functional alcoholism, Lost was never a role model for hospital interns. Now that Dr. Shepard squared has gone on to a better, hopefully less accident-prone place, where will we fans ever find our illegal and falsified prescriptions of malpracticing hunks? Canada, naturally. In David Cronenberg’s 1988 masterpiece Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons plays--whaddya know--two related gynecologists slowly slipping into a drug addicted depression. While wielding medical instruments. On women’s vaginas. Wow. This makes a mere 18-hour spinal cord rebuilding look like a romp on the beach.

5. Undoing the Past

“What happened, happened!” shouted so many an island survivor, but Lost’s final season tried awfully hard to put us in a reality where it didn’t. For a somewhat similar plot thread, check out 2004’sThe Butterfly Effect, an ambitiously flawed sci-fi love story of sorts that also shared a few random Lost ties: leading men temporarily bound to wheelchairs, likable dogs, surprise bombs with devastating results, and black-and-white journals that also serve as vouchers for time traveling.

6. Boars

John Locke instantly proved his worth by serving up porkchops his first week as a castaway, but Gary Oldman found himself on the wrong side of dinner when his wheelchair-bound--whoa! double link!--millionaire molester reunited with Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector.

7. Smoke Monster

Gray precipitation that moistens the air and summons ghosts? Call your lawyer, John Carpenter! Though Smokey, aka The Man In Black When Mobile didn’t have a whole lot in common with the pirate ghoulies of 1980’s The Fog, there are plenty of random links: shipwrecks, radio towers, Maggie Grace (a few steps removed of course). But hey. It’s John Carpenter’s The Fog. Do you really need another reason?

8. The Lottery

Ever say to yourself “If my numbers would just come up, all my problems would be solved!” Then you watched Hugo “Hurley” Reyes lose his friends, grandfather, and sanity in a pile of green and said, “Well, A LOT of my other problems would still be solved!” Maybe you need a harsher lesson in the fickle nature of Lady Luck. If that’s the case, queue up Final Destination 2 for a reality check, where one newly minted motorcyclist learns the hard way that money may buy gold rings and frozen dinners, but it won’t pay off Death to spare you from an eye gouging via fire escape.

9. Plane Crash

First class or coach, passengers on Oceanic Flight 815 started the series with a horror movie of their own, a crash that had the nerve to menace them even on land (pity the poor sucked-into-engine pilot). For the big screen, few films have ever quite matched the chaotic horror of 1993’s Alive, a crash made all the more terrifying by the fact that it actually happened.

10. The Numbers

Though we never learned the true significance of 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42, just knowing such digits held mystical and/or electromagnet powers was enough to keep us constantly ruminating on their place in the world (and on our own lottery tickets). What better companion piece is there then, than Vincenzo Natali's low budget 1997 mystery Cube, a film which shares Lost’s penchant for ambiguity, mismatched people forced to work together, and characters named after something they vaguely represent (in this case, American prisons). Also, savvy mathematicians (which thankfully includes one of Cube’s leads) are quick to latch onto the numerals found inside each cubic doorway, decoding their meaning and thus providing Losies with their own fan-fiction fantasy answer involving square roots and booby traps.