10 More Awesome Plot Twists That Totally Saved Terrible Movies

The Butterfly Effect is certainly an interesting movie but a fundamentally incoherent one, in which Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) discovers he can travel back in time to inhabit the body of his younger self, while hoping he can change his troubled future for the better.

Despite its ambitious concept, the movie is full of timey-wimey plot holes and inconsistencies which ruin most of the fun, such as an infamous scene where Evan attempts to prove his abilities to a fellow prison inmate by returning to his childhood and impaling the palms of his hands.

Except, the movie's own established time travel logic dictates that if Evan had indeed done that, then his palms would have always appeared wounded to the inmate rather than suddenly seeming so.

It's an over-sentimental mess of a movie with some fitfully intriguing ideas, though achieves an inspired transcendence in its categorically insane original ending, which was restored for the film's director's cut on home video.

In this ending, Evan realises his time-hopping shenanigans have ruined the lives of basically everyone he cares about, and so travels back to when he was a baby in the womb, where he strangles himself with his own umbilical cord.

By dying, Evan negates his negative impact on the timeline and ensures those around him have more favourable, hopeful futures.

To be clear, it's a completely outrageous ending, and yet also by far the most creative thing the entire movie does, even if this late-stage twist wasn't what audiences saw on its original release.