Butterfly Crush

The first thing you need to know about Butterfly Crush is that it’s directed by a clown. No, actually. Director Alan Clay wrote multiple books about the art of clowning and had his own clown school in Australia for a while. The second thing you need to know is that Butterfly Crush is mostly straight. I might be bending the rules by including it on my site at all. The last thing you need to know about Butterfly Crush is that it’s fucking insane. It’s that factor that’s making me bend the rules for its inclusion. Most sapphic movies that are bad and cheap are just boring. Butterfly Crush ain’t boring. It’s weird as hell and so incompetent it almost reaches the uncanny valley. So yeah, the core love story here is between a man and a woman. But please, let me have this one. I need it.

Butterfly Crush is about a musical duo who get involved with an astrology themed VR sex cult. You see what I mean about insane? The duo of singers, Eva and Moana apparently had a relationship before the start of the film. But particularly Eva’s increasing interest in the VR sex cult comes between them. Eva is love bombed by the cult while Moana is often scapegoated. But there’s a nice cult boy named Matt who starts taking Moana out on dates. Somehow, the cult guy and Moana end up being the film’s main love story. Leader of the cult, Star promises Eva and Moana stardom. Seduced and possibly coerced by the cult, Eva and Moana sign a predatory contract that means Star will be the only one who profits from their success.

I really feel like the whole VR sex cult thing works not just as a summary of the film but as a review. Did you think a movie with a VR sex cult from 2010 was going to be good? Because it isn’t. It’s fuck awful, actually. It’s also too cheap to ever really show you the VR stuff. But don’t worry. Characters talk about how cool it was after the fact. I also don’t really know how astrology fits into any of this, but it’s there somewhere. I think there might be some vague commentary on therapy in there too.

One of the problems with Butterfly Crush is that it’s too incompetent to adequately share its point of view. I finished the film thinking that director Alan Clay actually might like everything about the VR sex cult except its leader. The VR stuff? Cool. The astrology stuff? He seems into that too. Though as previously mentioned, the sex cult uses pretty standard group therapy as a tactic which makes me wonder if he’s anti-therapy. But given that he portrays everything about this cult except its leader as cool, maybe that means he supports it. This ambiguity of opinion also affects the depiction of bisexuality. I think it’s possible the film thinks bisexuality is bad. But I’m remarkably unsure of that opinion because I don’t really know what this movie thinks about anything.

The queerness here is almost exclusively in dialogue and largely in the past tense. It’s after the first awful musical number that Moana makes a comment about how they haven’t been sexually involved recently. Despite being not really involved at the start of the film, Moana and Eva manage to break up about three times during the film’s runtime anyway. I’m also pretty certain they literally never physically interact. Eva and Moana were doing a good example of physical distancing all the way back in 2010. This distance is obviously not the case with Moana’s male love interest. It remains somewhat true for Eva and other women, though. Cult leader Star basically throws other women at Eva, encouraging her to be bisexual, even though I don’t think she ever shared an attraction to men. And while we get dialogue about this, there is no actual same-sex affection on display.

I also really need to highlight the film’s music. It’s possibly the worst part about the whole movie. And that’s saying something. The actress who’s playing Moana can actually sing. But they gave her nothing worth singing. These songs are like bad showtunes. The first one is about the girls’ desire to be “rock stars” despite it being a song that would at best, fit in on a Disney TV movie. But that’s giving the songs way too much credit. The performances are also awful. Eva and Moana’s staggering lack of chemistry affects them here too. Their half-assed choreography is laughable. It’s a bold move to make a film about two people chasing fame and then to depict them being all-around awful at their chosen profession.

Frankly, I had a great time with Butterfly Crush. This is exactly the kind of movie I expect to see on Tubi. This is a fascinating and often funny kind of bad. It’s a film that took a lot of risks and made bold choices. And none of them paid off at all. Every aspect about this movie is incompetent to the point of it being genuinely interesting to behold. Director Alan Clay has another movie on Tubi. It’s a straight love story about a woman who becomes a clown and falls in love with a clown. I’ve now seen that too. And it is worse. The VR sex cult musical is the better of Clay’s films. I would say that this shows progress as a director, but it turns out the straight clown love story came after Butterfly Crush so I guess he’s actually regressing.

Overall rating: 2.1/10

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