Sometimes, when you hear a film is utter crap, you tend to do one of two things: avoid it altogether or see it out of morbid curiosity. When the opportunity arose to review walking drugstore Lindsay Lohan's universally reviled suspense thriller, I Know Who Killed Me, I first declined but soon changed my mind and decided to take on the task. I wanted to see if it truly was as bad as everyone said it was. A few days and 106 minutes later, I found that much to my surprise, it wasn't.
It was actually worse.
I Know Who Killed Me is the tale of small town rich girl Aubrey Fleming (Lohan). Aubrey is a solid student, fledgling writer and a promising but unsure piano player who is abducted and tortured by a sadistic serial killer Aubrey. While the FBI, the local cops and Aubrey's parents (a seriously slumming Neal McDonough and Julia Ormond) look for the abducted young woman, Herr Serial Killer proceeds to torture Aubrey by removing sections of her skin, some fingers, her right forearm as well as one of her legs from the knee down.
But that doesn't stop Aubrey from escaping her captor. She is found on the side of the road and awakes a few days later on in the hospital. Only now, Aubrey thinks she is a low-class, foul-mouthed slut of a stripper (woo hoo!), one that always keeps her clothes on while performing (D'oh!), named Dakota Moss. Moss moves back into Aubrey's parent's house, proceeds to screw Aubrey's boyfriend while Mom is downstairs and swear up a blue streak around everyone, all while trying to find out who tortured her and killed "Aubrey."
Plain and simple, nothing in this film works, and there is plenty of blame to go around, starting with Jeffrey Hammond's collection of chicken scratch that passes for a screenplay. Hammond's first -- and pray, last -- script is filled with paper-thin characters that sprout dialogue that is the working definition of laughable, an overabundance of red herrings (any male character with more than two lines of dialogue is possibly the killer) and plot holes big enough to drive a couple of 18-wheeler trucks through...at the same time. (Exactly how does someone with an amputated arm and leg, and despite being strapped down onto a table, manage to escape from a basement?)
Chris Siverston's pompous direction does nothing to hide Hammond's screenplay deficiencies. In fact, it makes them all the more apparent. I know that when stuck with a terrible screenplay, chances are unless you're named Spielberg or Scorsese, there is nothing you can do to make it work. Even so, the former independent filmmaker's ham-fisted handling of the material attempts to deliver an atmosphere of mystery, suspense and eroticism, but fails miserably. Even worse is Siverston's overbearing, symbolic use of the colors blue and red, which is so continuous and obvious that I swear I saw another color after the film was over: purple, which was the color of my skull after being beaten with 106 long minutes of Symbolism for Simpletons.
Then there is the film's young star. As we all know, the TMZ.com poster child has had a rather rough time transitioning from teenager to young adult (yeah, right) and was reportedly whacked out of her mind on illegal substances when she worked on this film. I would venture to think that she was also stoned beyond measure at the time she read the screenplay. If she was indeed coked-up during filming, it shows in every scene she's in. Her glassy-eyed line readings are flat, and her strip club dancing scenes are as hysterically funny as her attempts at being a foul-mouthed bad girl. After seeing her comatose dual performance in this film, I would tend to think that all the hype about the young starlet in the past decade or so was the result of marketing by the Disney studios, the paparazzi and a well-endowed chest than it was actual talent.
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