Movies

Pia Zadora is the perfect sexy nymph. Ennio Morricone provides a score that rings a bell because it almost sounds like a"spaghetti western". Stacy Keach as the lusting daddy is fine, and Orson Wells comes across as a curiosity. The problem lies with the script. At first things take their time, introducing characters at a leisurely rate. There is a slow buildup but little idea where the movie is going. Then suddenly the pace quickens, and logic begins to fly out the window. In the end there are unresolved issues dangling uncomfortably, a ridiculous legal unwinding, and the viewer is left holding a very large bag of questions. Nudity does not a movie make, and "Butterfly", despite the titillating bathtub scene, is rather unsatisfying. - MERK

Butterfly is a low quality film, with poor acting and script. Though watchable for its dissimilarity and setting.Funny to me that it's labelled a crime/drama, seems they didn't want to label it anything else. The ending's perplexing and absurd. Orson Welles is amusing as the judge.

Adaptation of James M. Cain's book "The Butterfly" won Pia Zadora a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer before anyone had even screened the film, setting into motion an awards-show controversy that is far more interesting than anything in this movie. Shabby potboiler has a sexy teenager in 1930s Arizona reuniting herself with a man who may be her long-lost father; that doesn't stop her from seducing him, which leads to dirty doings, a murder, and a final act in the courthouse (with Orson Welles as the judge!). Co-screenwriter Matt Cimber also directed the picture, but he fails to create a depiction of this time and place that is half-way realistic, preferring to let Zadora's sexual antics carry the load. She isn't terrible, yet her cameo in "Hairspray" a few years later far exceeds anything she does here. *1/2 from ****