Verdict: Good for a few - and only a few - unintentional laughs.

By BOB LONGINO
Cox News Service

Too bad Ashton Kutcher's supposedly scary and unnerving "The Butterfly Effect" isn't as bad as "Gigli." That would make it horrible enough to be worth watching.

What we have here is a film set up as an intense psychological sci-fi drama where people die and strange things happen. Funny thing, though, what happens is ultimately so absurd - and sometimes so downright unintentionally laughable - that nobody associated with making this movie can possibly emerge unscathed.

Kutcher has built a successful career off his dead-on portrayal of TV's ultimate himbo on "That '70s Show." He's bolstered his celebrity cachet by co-creating and hosting the often funny and inspired celebrity gotcha show, MTV's "Punk'd." (While Kutcher insists he's decided to pull the plug on "Punk'd," we'll believe it when we no longer see it on the tube.)

He's also blown up, which is Hollywoodspeak for becoming a hot commodity. That's because last year the 26-year-old actor and the 41-year-old Demi Moore teamed up to walk red carpets and fuel rumors they were the most torrid twosome this side of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

"The Butterfly Effect" is not going to help this guy's career. It's a movie as ridiculously weird as it is ludicrously stitched together.

Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a young man whose brain is quite different from yours and mine. He often blacks out and doesn't know what's happening. But eventually he learns he can go back in time and change events - hopefully for the better. Like he wants to help his girlfriend, whose brother is a violent psycho. Or he wants to stop her dad, who's a despicable child pornographer. So he mentally wigs (he crinkles his eyebrows) and goes back in time (the world around him shakes and melts away before becoming the past) and he does or says things to change events. Only that in turn changes everything, which means, when he wakes up, he discovers he's in jail and maybe is about to be raped by big, hulking cons.

Or maybe his childhood sweetie (Amy Smart) is a penny-ante hooker.

Or maybe, horror of horrors, he's no longer a smart, caring kid but a slick, full-of-himself frat boy.

As Evan says in all seriousness, "It's just hard to make things right."

All this foolishness was contrived by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, who co-wrote and co-directed "The Butterfly Effect." They earlier teamed to write "Final Destination 2," last year's horror movie about a monstrous highway accident and a group of kids trying to avoid death.

Much more disturbing is that the mainstream-oriented "Butterfly Effect" found its way into becoming part of this month's Sundance Film Festival, heretofore a celebration of indie filmmaking.

"The Butterfly Effect" at Sundance? Now that is something scary and unnerving.