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I Know Who Killed Me!
Fingers! Leg! Hand! Gone!
2007
Review: August 17, 2007
Director: Chris Sivertson
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty
YOU BET.
THE SETUP:
It’s too complicated to even be explained.
DISCUSSION:
The fact is, Lindsay Lohan is in a much worse place than we realize. Sure she’s drinking and on drugs and whatever else we don’t even know about yet, but the fact that she chose this script speaks to deep-rooted and intractable psychological problems that are very likely beyond the reach of Earth-based therapies.
You can’t say “WHAT were they thinking?” enough about this movie. I can’t imagine what was going through the mind of anyone involved in this. We open with Lindsay dancing in a strip club. The pole is bloody after she touches it. We later see this entire scene again, so I’m guessing that the only reason it’s here is to maximize footage of Lindsay stripping. Only she doesn’t strip, but we’ll get to that later.
Then we see her in class, where she’s reading a story about how she “knew how to turn her life into a movie.” This is Aubrey Fleming, a nice girl from New Salem, which I think is supposed to be in Connecticut. Somewhere in here she says she always felt like half a person. Then we see Aubrey—obnoxious name, by the way—being taught by her piano teacher in preparation for the young artist competition, which Aubrey has won before. But Aubrey quits piano lessons! Because, you see, she’s a writer. She also has a hairless cat with alarmingly huge nuts. You think I’m kidding, but they are prominently featured for longer than you want to look at them. We also find out that there’s a serial killer on the loose, and that Aubrey’s boyfriend Jarrod wants to fuck her, but she won’t put out.
SPOILERS > > >
So Aubrey is kidnapped, and everybody looks for her. We see her fingers being frozen under dry ice, all blackened, then a detailed close-up as the dry ice is removed, along with the flesh of her fingers. We also get a loving close-up of her fingers, stripped of their flesh. Then we have a long sequence as her fingers are cut off. Then this woman is driving, saying to whoever on the phone that she, too, “feels like half a person,” when she finds Lindsay in a ditch with no fingers and no leg. She’s taken to the hospital and Julia Ormond and Dad shows up and Lindsay insists that she’s not Aubrey, but Dakota Moss.
We start to get Dakota’s story. She started stripping at a young age [although she is the only performer in the club that never goes topless, although she does have these red dots on her tits that are supposed to suggest nipples. This leads to the second of our rather distasteful stripping scenes, in which we look right up Lindsay's crotch. This is intercut with Dakota telling a guy who she suspects is “fuzz” about prying $11 from the cold, dead fingers of her crackwhore mother. Then poor Julia Ormond [who has some of the worst overemoting scenes] does an insipid speech about “Mr. Jervis,” Aubrey’s favorite stuffed animal. These next few scenes is where the most amusement this movie has to offer comes, as it consists of Lindsay smoking and swearing and being a bitch, and Julia trying to suffer nobly and hold back her tears. We also have a lot of tasteless shots of her stumps, and we get an amusing line from Lindsay: “Fingers! Leg! Hand! Gone!” Then she gets some very fake-looking stigmata! This movie is just going to pile on anything it can!
So then Aubrey’s BF Jarrod shows up again, with blue roses to make us think he could be the killer, who we can’t help but notice favors a certain shade of blue. Dakota takes him upstairs and they have AMPUTEE SEX while Julia downstairs is forced to listen! Julia scrubs her sink to deal with her own frustration. You will notice that any distasteful stumps are kept hidden from view while the scrumping is going on, and the whole thing is given an even more gross sheen by the upbeat music that implies this is all super awesome! You really kind of need a shower after watching this movie.
Then we have ANOTHER stripping flashback, a repeat of the one where the blood is on the pole, which we discover is because Dakota’s finger spontaneously fell off while stripping! She pulls off her glove and a finger falls out. There is a somewhat prominently placed product placement for American Spirit cigarettes, then Lindsay is pretty chill about having just lost a finger as she illegally smokes on the bus, but I guess she’s used to the hard-knock, spontaneous-digit-loss life.
Now things start coming to thick and fast it’s hard to really process. We get a sample of Aubrey’s horrid, horrid writing: “[some revelation] slammed her in the gut like a celestial fist.” A CELESTIAL FIST, ladies and gentlemen. Have you ever looked up to the heavens and seen a giant fist? Neither have astronomers. Then there’s an obnoxious product placement for Ask.com as Dakota looks up TWIN STIGMATA. This is the utterly ludicrous idea that when one twin gets injured, the other twin spontaneously gets injured, too.
Then she has a vision in a mirror of herself—or is it?—being buried in a glass coffin and a wise old owl. Then she confronts dad with the reality that—are you ready?—Julia’s real daughter died, so he bought Aubrey off a crackwhore who had twins! So there really ARE two Lindsays! Then Dakota sews her own finger back on with the help of a little duct tape!
Then she goes and sneaks into the house where the killer [who never takes off his blue baseball cap] is. She finds a medal [at some point, maybe not now] and discovers the killer’s motive: Someone’s killing all the Young Artists! She chops off the killer’s hand, we see that Aubrey’s dad, who somehow found the house, is bleeding to death on the operating table, and by now we’ve discovered who the killer is: it was the piano teacher! I was REALLY hoping for a scene in which he slashes at Dakota with a knife while shouting “NO ONE QUITS THE YOUNG ARTISTS PROGRAM!,” but alas no. Dakota kills him, heads out to the cemetery and digs up Aubrey, who is still alive, despite having been buried for what seems like seven hours. She also does this by smashing the glass inches over Aubrey’s face, which doesn’t seem like the best idea. Then the long-lost twins are reunited atop the grave, finally [we imagine] becoming the “whole person” they never felt they could be.
< < < SPOILERS END
CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? WHAT a phenomenally dumb idea! I can buy that maybe some less-than-gifted writer thought this would be just so freaky [this is screenwriter Jeff Hammond's first produced script], but once other people start a) buying it, b) making it, and c) starring in it we start to have evidence of a troubling decline in our nation’s intelligence. One can kind of see—from what one imagines to be her warped perspective—why Lohan would want to do this, as perhaps she thought it was all gritty and she would get to turn her cute teen image on end and smoke and strip and be all adult and get limbs amputated. Plus I’m sure her eyes lit up at the mention of the word “crackwhore.” I once read a little interview with her in which they asked her whether she was going to go to college and she said something to the effect of “No. I already know I want to be an actress, so what’s the point?” Well Lindsay, now you know.
I was all revved to see this because it looked horrendous in a fun way, and when reviews started comparing it to The Butterfly Effect for how it takes on grim subject matter it isn’t prepared to deal with, I was sold. Alas, it was only a B- in terms of fun. It’s just too unpleasant and dramatically inert. At least we do have some fun with Lindsay sassing off to everyone and Julia weeping and sniffling and scrubbing, but that’s just not quite enough. Especially when the awe-inspiring stupidity of the answer to the mystery hits you like a celestial fist.
My movie experience was enhanced by the addition of two Times Square drunks who wandered in right at the climax of the movie, each, I shit you not, holding a 40. They proceeded to talk to each other, drawing angry shushing from the paying patrons, which resulted in theater staff being summoned, loud, slurred words, and then—a fistfight! It was amazing. The drunks were completely unapologetic, even standing arguing with the police outside when I left the theater. Well, SOMETHING had to make the movie bearable.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you really want to see an off-the-wall stinker, want to laugh at Lindsay Lohan, or both.
