Imagine a particularly poor Outer Limits episode remade by Roland Emmerich's hypnotised apeman offspring.

Rating: 1/10 (10 December 2007)

Then imagine the best actor in it being - wait for it - Mr Eric Stoltz!
With all the credibility, appeal and consistency of a bad bout of diarrhoea comes The Butterfly Effect, sure to cause irreversible damage to the brain cells of any who encounter it.
The "Butterfly Effect" theory states that even minute changes in the present can have massive and incomprehensibly wide-ranging impacts on the future. In the movie this is represented by a gimpy bloke making a series of rather large changes to his past, each time leaving him in the same university with the same people (who randomly switch between a grab bag of zero-dimensional stereotypes): "Oh,look, now she's a crack-whore." "Ha, now he's a cripple!"
Thus, actors who struggle to convince in just one role are impossibly tasked with playing many.
If brutalising general logical consistency and weren't enough, the film manages to include just about everything you'd expect to find in a crap short story by a 14 year-old Evanescence fan. Child abuse? Check. Drug abuse? Check. Audience abuse? By the bucketload.
Stir in a lead character who brutally murders one of his friends halfway through and shows no apparent remorse at any point (it's okay, I'll just use my journal to break the rules of physics and then forget about it) and you have one of the most severe affronts to creation ever witnessed.
But hey, at least it has Eric Stoltz.