I liked this movie better, I think, when it was Turistas, or maybe Wolf Creek. Or maybe even that Anaconda sequel. But, for the record, there are these research people who go to Tasmania to find evidence of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, which I guess is a real animal? If it wasn’t for all the pesky animal-bonded cannibals as foreshadowed in the opening scene, they probably would have just done a little dance, made a little love, and generally got down tonight, only to leave empty-handed a little bit later. Instead, you know: terror! So, that happened.

Sometime before I started reviewing things, I saw a cool sci-fi movie in which Ashton Kutcher can relive his past, modify events to make things better, and then wake up out of his memories to find a world of improvements, right? Except, there’s always some kind of unintended consequence that makes things worse, and he just missed the intervening years, so he has to figure out what went wrong, and then go back and fix it better, which will work this time, right? And yeah, it’s pretty cool. You should see it.

I missed the sequel, but Butterfly Effect 3 was my second movie of the festival, and, well… if I wanted to have some minimal grasp of the underpinnings of the world, it’s a good thing I saw the first one. Plus, it’s not really much like they followed exactly those same rules anyway, but at least I knew in advance there’s a dude who came jump back in time and then wander around changing things if he feels like it, despite knowing that it’s usually a bad idea. Only, his murdered high-school girlfriend’s sister comes to him requesting assistance in discovering her murderer. And that can’t hurt anything, right? He certainly won’t accidentally create a serial killer for whom he is usually the police’s prime suspect! …right?

If you can ignore the physics-underpinnings part and just accept that he can go to whenever he wants, etc., the plot is a pretty nice mystery that I figure took me over half the film to work out. Watch for Rachel Miner as a threepeat Horrorfest actress. Good for her!

Remember back in November, when I didn’t go to the third Horrorfest and then review a massive pile of movies, and it was very concerning and you were kind of sad to miss out on an entire new batch of movies you will never, ever see yourself, but you at least kind of want to know what it would be like for someone who likes the idea of that kind of thing. Well, there’s good news! As part of an apparent line of mistakes made by the people in charge, whoever they are, it didn’t happen until this weekend instead. So, here we are.

The first flick, From Within, is a real improvement over last year’s mediocre opening. There’s this small generic town that’s dominated by a mega-church, which, come to think of it, is maybe implausible? And one day, a goth-looking guy reads some Latin out of a book, which everyone knows means shit is about to go down. Except, instead of doing anything cool and magical, he kills himself. And then, his girlfriend dies under apparently suicidal but certainly mysterious circumstances. The rest of the movie follows around a girl present at the first girl’s death who is trying to figure out what happened, the dead goth’s brooding brother with a dark past and a pretty plum role as a recognizable teen on the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the holy war that is about to hit Grovetown. Mostly, though, the brooding! I’m pretty sure this was a fraction of what seeing Twilight would have been like, only without the irritating audience and with enough entertaining violence to balance the tweeness.

Best part, though, is the brooding dude’s cousin, who is sufficiently full of snark that she plays piano chords of doom when we learn about the horrible thing that is about to happen to our plucky heroine. I may be in love.

Except for the fact that I’m willing to see it again, this might get me in trouble with my father. But after several intriguing previews in front of all the art house flicks I’ve been seeing in the past couple of months, I went to see Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Gran Torino. And it’s good! Eastwood still sees himself as incredibly bad-ass, which seems ridiculous for a 79 year-old man. Yet, either through weight of history, gravelliness of voice, or sheer force of will, he can still pull it off. Hell, the gravelly moans were as much an extra character in every scene as the titular vehicle was.

So Eastwood lives in his house in Detroit, in the neighborhood he hasn’t left since the Korean War ended, and he has gradually watched his friends move away or die and be replaced by a bunch of Asians that basically all look alike to him. His family is useless and his wife has just died, which leaves him a bitter racist, alone with nothing but time on his hands and his sweet, sexy sports car that he never drives. Oh, and his dog who is old like him, but I’m sure nothing bad will happen to, right? Right?

The downside to all this, if you leave out his existential twilight, non-stop racist anger, and the Catholic priest who won’t stop hanging on the bell day and night, is that there’s a Ricer gang terrorizing the neighbors (well, really the neighborhood in general, but he probably wouldn’t know if it weren’t happening in his front yard), and once he’s scared them off, he becomes the last thing he wants to be: a hero. After that, things start to get complicated.

There are moments of cringe-inducing uncomfortableness, genuine warmth, understated hilarity, and raw-edged fury. But as much good acting and scripting as was crammed into the film, I think what I like best about it is that it isn’t a story of redemption where the crusty old racist learns a valuable lesson and loves everyone. It might be cool if it happened in real life, but the truth is, that kind of thing mostly doesn’t, and I’ve seen it often enough on screen that it was refreshing to see something different. I think Eastwood-the-director only took the easy way out of a scene once in the entire film, and more power to him for it. I like movies that aren’t perfectly easy to watch or perfectly easy to pin down and categorize.