I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

Tagline: If you think you know the secret…think twice.

Curiosity: When the special lady friend says she’s willing to watch a bad movie with me, I follow through.

Plot: We open on Dakota Moss (Lindsay Lohan), dressed in searing red, stripping and/or bleeding. It is hot and/or gross (OK, just gross). C-C-C-C-CUT to Aubrey Fleming (Lohan again), dressed in some seriously blue blues, being a talented artist. She plays piano and writes lurid pulp fiction for his English class that everyone likes (despite being kind of awful).

BUT THEN SHE DISAPPEARS.

There’s a killer out killin’ high school gals. He digs cutting off their limbs and then putting them in no-win scenarios, like tossing them in a lake. Gruesome stuff, and Aubrey is his next victim. BUT THEN A TWIST! Aubrey is found on the side of a road, sans an arm and a leg but still alive. Only she’s not Aubrey. She claims she’s the smoke-loving, sex-having, brassy ‘n’ sassy stripper Dakota Moss. Is it mistaken identity? Trauma? Better yet…will Aubrey/Dakota ever know who killed her? Find out all this and more, in Tim Burton’s The Parent Trap!

Thoughts: I try to hold off on spoilers (The Happening notwithstanding), but the filmmakers made little effort to conceal their big twist, from the big splashy use of color to denote characters to the got-damn winking poster slogan. Combine that with my therapist girlfriend’s freakish ability to figure out the killer like five minutes in, and I Know Who Killed Me is devoid of tension.

Oh yeah, and the title? That’s a line of dialogue. Someone looks into someone else’s eyes and says that line. I live for these moments. If Luke Skywalker looked at Yoda and said, “It’s time to end these Star Wars… with the return of the jedi,” and then made some sort of fist-pumping action, I would be ecstatic. Euphoric even.

So the twists are beat and the dialogue is awful. And yet, we both found I Know Who Killed Me compelling enough to sit through. The gore was surprising, perhaps because Lohan doesn’t really make this kind of a movie (or any movie) often. Director Chris Sivertson has a striking visual sense for a horror director, in that he uses blues and reds over muted browns and blacks and greens. The movie does pop, and I think Sivertson half-earns comparisons to Dario Argento. I say half because Argento’s movies are also good. Then again, Argento also has a knack for finding good locations, whereas Sivertson just kind of forces whatever color he needs into the frame. It is obnoxious how many blue things enter Aubrey’s life.

Reflection: I probably could have done without the cigarette-laden amputee sex scene that was used for comedic purposes. Poor Julia Ormond (First Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) deserved better than that.