Title: Butterfly Kisses
Genre: Thriller/Horror
Synopsis: (from imdb) A filmmaker discovers a box of video tapes depicting two students’ disturbing film project featuring a local horror legend, The Peeping Tom. As he sets out to prove this story is real and release it as a work of his own, he loses himself and the film crew following him into his project.
Streaming on Amazon Video.
With the introduction of so many streaming services and places to watch movies and other media online, it is difficult to find quality entertainment to watch. This is especially true in the world of the horror move lover: anyone with a good enough camera (including the iPhone 5 camera) and some willing friends/associates can create a film and upload it for viewing. This explains the huge number of simply terrible horror movies one runs into on any given service. Even the so-called “big finance” movies can be failures, no matter how good they look or how pervasive their marketing is. (I’m looking at you The Open House).
On the other hand, if you watch enough movies, as I do, you can sometime find some gems hidden in the coal-dusted rubble. I’m not saying these are diamond, but they’re a lot better than the usual fare found in the horror genre.
For this blog post, I’m going to be writing about Butterfly Kisses, an Amazon Prime offering. Amazon Prime has a LOT of horror movies, and it takes a patient soul (like me) to wade through the chaff to get to the pure grain of the good movies.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know I have preference for found-footage horror. Some like potted meat, I like found footage horror. While I love the genre, found footage can be a serious hit or miss. Basically, some of the worse I’ve seen are like some of the ghost hunting shows on cable, complete with boring parts.
However, every once in a while, I get lucky and find a mediocre to good found footage horror film that doesn’t have a lot of heavy breathing and people asking “what’s that”?
Butterfly Kisses is a found footage horror film resting on an interesting premise: a film within a film. A filmmaker discovers a box of tapes in his home. These tapes depict the project of two film students who were investigating a local urban legend call the Peeping Tom. The bulk of the film is this filmmaker trying to prove that this legend is true while he sifts through the footage the students left behind. There’s two stories running: the filmmaker in the “present time” and the students “in the past”.
All in all, it was a pretty interesting movie. I liked the multiple layers of the film and the subplots which weaved in and out of the narrative. There was very little shaky-cam and a few good jump scares. I actually watched the movie twice to catch all the little details that came into play later.
Certainly, it’s a theme/plot device that’s been addressed before in numerous movies and shows, but the execution in this movie is pretty good. The acting is decent and there are some parts which are actually kind of touching/sad.
Not to wax overly philosophical, but the film also brings up themes of what is real/what is not, and how far one is willing to go for a vision and/or belief.
Give Butterfly Kisses a try. While it’s not a great film, I’ve seen a lot worse.
Grade: B+
