I Know Who Killed Me (2007)
Despite this movie making it to several people’s “worst movies of all time,” it’s really not quite as bad as most people would make it out to be. And yeah, I really do hate myself for having said that. I REALLY do. The way of the samurai dictates that having said such a thing the only honorable course of action is to recite a haiku and disembowel myself. But I’m scared of blood. And sharp objects. And I’m not a samurai. However, I did make a haiku just in case:
What kind of person would I be if I didn't screen cap this and say something like "Ahh, here's the Lindsay we know and love?"
Red and blue again
Lohan’s two roles are the same
Deep Hurting it’s not
Premise: 3/5
Lindsay Lohan is Aubrey, this perfect girl apparently great at writing fiction, playing music, getting the star quarterback for a boyfriend, and being accepted at Yale. How nifty for her! Well, nifty but for the fact that she gets kidnapped, each of the fingers on her right hand cut off, then her entire right hand, then most of her right leg below the knee. How ever will she drive Herbie the Love Bug through wacky adventures now?
Lindsay Lohan is then found lying just off a country highway, missing said digits and limb pieces and rushed to a hospital. When she finally comes out of the shock coma she insists that she’s not Aubrey the perfect teen template, she’s actually Dakota the dirty stripper whose momma was a crack addict. She gets a bionic (I’m sorry, I mean prosthetic) hand and leg and goes home with the rich and successful folks insisting that she’s their daughter, then shags Aubrey’s boyfriend to prove that she’s not actually Aubrey (’cuz perfect Lindsay would never give it up, don’t ya know?).
Problem is, Dakota keeps having weird dreams and bleeding wounds appearing on her every so often for no good reason. Some of Aubrey’s stuff gives her almost a sense of deja vu, but it’s something more than just an amnesiac remembering things. If you think you might actually consider watching this movie and don’t want spoilers, skip everything between the next two pictures, because I feel the need to justify why I didn’t hate this movie as much as I wanted to.
Pun about "giving the finger lolololol" would go here.
Okay–now that you’ve put the kids to bed, covered your eyes, plugged your ears and went “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU,” I can talk about the big and kinda dumb twists that somehow made this movie less obnoxious than it started out. Aubrey’s big writing focus has been a story about a hard-livin’ stripper named Dakota–of course the first thought I had was “oh, so the whole movie’s just going to end up being this story Aubrey wrote?” But it’s not that–Dakota is actually a real person, and she actually is the girl that they thought escaped from the killer/mutilator. She never escaped anyone though. Her mom died from a crack OD but she had an envelope with an address on it that she was going to investigate, because she wanted to know who the hell would send her crackwhore mom money. In order to raise the money to travel she took a job as a stripper, but had to suddenly quit when one of her fingers fell off for no good reason. She was hitching and hiking into town when she passed out and got found by the people who rushed her to the hospital. It turns out that her crackhead mom had twins and sold the other twin to a grieving father whose child was stillborn–the grieving father, no surprise, turns out to be Aubrey’s “dad.” She finds some stuff about “stigmatic twins” on the internet (best source for any and all trustworthy research! And Art Bell, who also cameos): twins who have more than a mythic “psychic bond,” they actually suffer each other’s injuries. The good news is that means the real Aubrey’s still alive (or else Dakota would also be dead, of course), the bad news is, she’s running out of time and Dakota’s going to keep being mutilated as much as Aubrey is so they have to step on the gas to find her.
Is it stupid? Yeah, it pretty much is. However, if you throw away the boring and arty for no reason first half of the movie and just get to the stigmatic twin stuff and arty for weirdness’ sake of the last half, it actually gets kind of entertaining. It’s not particularly well done, but it seems clear to me from the last acts of the movie that they were trying (and somewhat succeeding) at making their own version of a classic Italian giallo horror movie. The killer’s lair, all the blue glass weaponry and stained glass windows just feel like one big (if amateur) homage to Dario Argento. This is something I was NOT expecting in the least, and redeemed the movie somewhat. Knowing that this was a wannabe Argento flick helped get me past all the suspension of disbelief issues that I had at first: logic is a liability in Italian horror cinema, and since this clearly wants to be part of that bloodline I can forgive some of its faults.
This is the "it's safe to start reading again" bear.
Cast: 1/5
Now that the spoiler/weird part is done, I can focus on something that really does suck in this movie: Lindsay Lohan. I thought I remembered her being hot, but this movie has made me question whether that was ever true. She looks anorexic as hell, and on top of that, there’s a scene where she’s dancing at a strip club but lacks the decency to actually go topless. Yeah, she really does wear a bikini top with nipple pasties on it when she’s pole-dancing and crawling around on all fours–nevermind that the other girls in the club actually do go topless. Was she afraid that flashing her boobies would ruin her career? Hate to break it to her, but it’s her CAREER that ruined her career. Now she just looks confusingly prudish for a supposedly extroverted street-life tough girl. And while I’m on the subject of Lohan, I should point out that she acts exactly the same whether she’s supposed to be Aubrey or Dakota, even though the two girls are supposed to be polar opposites. The big difference between the two is in how much clothing they’re wearing and whether or not they’re smoking (because that is clearly something only bad girls do). It’s too bad that so much of the movie rests on her, because she just doesn’t have what it takes to carry it–matching facial expressions to the lines you’re saying is the beginning of acting, not the end. I could wish that they’d gotten a more experienced actress for this role, but on the other hand due to all its other flaws and inconsistencies, Lohan being attached might be the only thing that got the movie released at all.
You ever get the feeling you're being watched? If Lohan does, she ain't showing it.
Almost everyone else (and certainly everyone else interesting) is relegated to a minor part, and some just vanish out of the movie altogether after not doing much. There’s no question this is a Lohan “indie cred” vehicle, but it’s pretty much a beater.
Technical: 2/5
Do you like the colors red and blue? I hope so, because you will be seeing them quite a bit. Now, since I found out that this movie’s got more in common with an Argento thriller than I could ever have guessed, I can see why the director likes using them so much. The problem is, it’s OVER-used and becomes incredibly tedious within the first fifteen minutes. There really is a lot of pretentious artfaggery going on in this movie that the first half just can’t support. Even Argento knew when to change things up, or just get around to making the damn movie. Rewind shots, greyscaling everything but the color blue, then quickly contrasting back to red is neat the first time you see it, but you can’t premise your entire film off just this one type of scene. After a certain point, it’s got all the subtlety of a chainsaw to the groin and built up my rage-o-meter to such heights I almost didn’t want to stick around until the end. The owl imagery is nicely subtle for a little while, but even that gets abused to the point where you’re just waiting for something, anything at all, to show up that’s new.
I'm still torn between whether I think this is cool or pretentious.
That being said, I AM glad I stayed through to the end. The “random” and “stupid” ending that IMDBers complain about was actually my favorite part. The killer’s lair, the crazy-ass blue blown glass knife he menaces Lohan with, that coffin, and all the pseudo-Italian stuff that goes on actually entertained me. It wasn’t particularly stunning, but it was enjoyable and made me forget just how much of a slog it was getting to that point.
Popcorn Factor: 1.5/5
I’m probably one of the few people who cares little enough about Lindsay Lohan one way or the other to let her tell me whether I should like or hate the movie. Looking at it as just a movie movie, there’s not enough for me to call it all that good or all that fun. The first parts are dull and self-indulgent, have too much of Lohan and her friends being basically unlikable (I don’t think that was the intent, but it was the effect), the middle part has the FBI agents being complete idiots and failing to follow up on any leads or pick up on any clues except utterly wrongheaded guesses (look, if someone tells you they work a strip club, and you have reason to believe she’s lying, wouldn’t you want to check the place out just to make sure? And wouldn’t you be looking for any possible connection between your current missing persons case and the murder of a girl in the same area just within the last week or so?). The last act is entertaining enough in a bizarre-world kind of way, but most folks just won’t get it or won’t care enough by that point to feel any sense of reward in it.
So, in sum: I Know Who Killed Me is not the worst movie ever (though it’s probably in the running for worst title ever), but it is something you can skip whether you’re looking for a good horror movie or a really bad one to laugh at.