I Know Who Killed Me

She knew a trick. She knew how to turn her life into a movie and watch things happen. 

Oh how dialogue in a film can be so indicative of the actress performing the character saying it.

***½

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For the Love of Blue

Director Sivertson has an affinity for blue, eh? Blue is indeed his aesthetic of choice and it is constant. As breathing is needed for us to function it seems Sivertson must have lots and lots of blue in every single scene of his film. We have the high school football team whose colors are blue. Blue gloves, blue buttons on the telephone, blue eyes, blue roses, blue, blue, blue. My favorite color is blue, but, good grief, he could have mixed things up just a little bit. Well, he did with a little red during Lohan's strip club dance scenes, but the use of blue remains the director's color of choice. I imagine this will also get on viewers' nerves.

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You know, the scene in the church, used as an investigative outpost for detectives to set up the names of the victims, clues, and crime scene photographs needed to get a read on the killer and find out how to stop him (or find the latest kidnapped Lohan), it really is quite a statement in regards to how one evil sicko demands such a braintrust of law enforcement and criminal specialists.

Lohan is Aubrey Fleming. In high school, preparing for college many miles away, parents yuppies in a lavish neighborhood and can afford a rather brash lawn and yard groundskeeper who takes off his shirt for her so he can show off, Aubrey even dates the quarterback. But life takes a turn for the worse when a psychopath kidnaps her and proceeds to torture her and remove her limbs. 

A body is found just off a country road by a distraught female motorist bemoaning a heavy break-up. It seems to be Aubrey but when she awakens, an arm and leg almost to the knee missing, she claims to be someone else entirely…a stripper named Dakota Moss. Dakota insists she’s not “this Aubrey chick” but goes along for the ride, living temporarily in the home of Aubrey, going to school, and working as a kind of temporary substitute until the real Aubrey is found.

Dakota was semi-raised by a crack-addict mother who later died from an overdose and wasn’t “raised in New Salem but in the real world”. Part of my enjoyment of this movie is seeing the “tough real world” Dakota reacting to yuppie mom Julie Ormond, hoping her daughter will emerge from a totally different young woman altogether from the Aubrey she lost on a football night while looking for the quarterback boyfriend. “Do I look like I’m in a fucking coma?!” she asks to Ormond who thinks Aubrey “is in there somewhere.” Dakota could go into the den of a killer and confront him, fight (even kill) the scumbag which is quite different than Aubrey who has always been sheltered in a loving, comforting environment, parents who nurture and give her support, while Dakota has scraped to get by, having to deal with the harsh world and all its unpleasantries.

I Know Who Killed Me is the kind of “train wreck film” that allowed Lohan to just escape into a role that allowed her to gyrate and dance exotically in front of lusty onlookers in a disco-ball, blue-and-red light affair on a stage and swear non-stop. The cops are convinced she knows more than she’s letting on while it seems to us that Dakota just doesn’t flat know what he looks like and wished his face, weight, height, appearance, whatever, was clearer, more defined. But nothing much surfaces. Laptops, paperwork, files, screens, giant billboards with all the details left in the wake of some madman still out and about. Is this person we see just a delusional Aubrey having created a street-strong, abrasive, bluntly-honest alter ego? Or are the cops wrong about her? The way her parents show their disappointment, frustration, and angst regarding Dakota responds to them, instead of the daughter they so long her to be, was convincing and sad to me.

This film has been decimated by everybody except a small few—not even a very vocal few, but few nonetheless—because of things like Lohan not really stripping like her character should, scenes like one of my favorites (because it is so absurd and wrong) where Dakota attempts to prove to Aubrey’s beau that she isn’t her (by screwing his brains out in her bedroom while Ormond is downstairs scrubbing the sink in a frantic distress because of their bumping and grinding), and the ghoulish torture violence (dry ice rectangular blocks pressed on flesh, along with severing from the killer’s own peculiar blue crystalline knife), with lots of “eek gatz” gore. Like severed fingers, blood pooling from an invisible knife wound, a finger literally taking gangrene in a manner of seconds, and flesh culled from a hand.

I just can't help myself. It is a fetish, I can't resist.

You add the “How far has lil Lindsay sunk?” that is prevalent on the minds of those who saw her in Parent Trap and Mean Girls, it is no surprise I Know Who Killed Me is considered a diabolical trash heap. Many attribute I Know Who Killed Me to the period of Lohan’s downward spiral. Shortly after, Georgia, co-starring Jane Fonda (also known for just a wee bit of controversy in her own right), went through a tumultuous production because of Lohan’s antics. Some—no many—felt I Know Who Killed Me was Lohan’s means to distance herself from the kids, to be accepted by an adult crowd. Instead, this film gained notoriety as a rotten apple that might forever tarnish any hopes of a career absent belittlement and giggly insult.

People get cut. That’s life

Where the film really pisses people off is in how “giallo convoluted” it gets in the plot. The discovery of a story on Aubrey’s hard drive on her laptop kind of provides incentive in many a viewer to check out but that ending with two girls laying by each other certainly only peppers the sauce giving viewers even more acid reflux. Toss in some nonsense about *stigmatic twins* and you have this plot that just taunts an audience looking for something easier to follow and less out of left field. Since I like shit out of left field, I consider myself a member of that very, tiny minority that actually enjoys this bizarre, twisty, warped thriller. I know that few find any value in this film whatsoever besides viewing it as a laughingstock. An embarrassment worthy of an actress who took her fame and potential talent, wasting it, squandering it.

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Let's Dance!!!

When Lindsay Lohan was linked to this project, immediately an uproar was viable with certain folks because of her image prior to all the partying and drugs and dui's. I have noticed, for some reason that escapes me, that she's had lips work done and a major boob job was obvious around the time of this film. She obviously has body issues which befuddles someone like me who thought Lohan was very, very attractive when entering her early twenties, and has since damaged her good looks, not to mention the potential of a career. If you point at this as a sign of things to come, I figure you'd be accurate in your assumption. While all of the scenes in the strip joint are shot in that odd off-focus style that tightens and softens images/faces/bodies in the room, while light both obscures and emerges characters in the "gentleman's club", it has been of some debate whether or not it works. It doesn't for most people, but I like it personally myself. I imagine it all is a haze for Dakota who tries to drown out the unpleasantness with drugs and booze, and to get through it such means seem ideal because of how they obscure the patrons who populate the room around the stage, but to me Sivertson wants the various "uglies" in attendance ogling her and the atmosphere of the dance scenes to carry a seediness and candy-colored seductive quality at the same time. I guess, also, in order for these scenes to work you have to find Lohan a sexual dynamo. Many don't. Many do. I don't now, but I certainly did at this time so they work for me. Like the giallo genre that many compare this film to, it has a rather unimpressive killer (he shows up early in the film and is so easily forgotten because the character isn't that established as someone we need to keep an eye on or assume is of any importance whatsover) and the plot just turns up a twist that isn't necessarily worth all the complications that are developed throughout. But, I would be lying if I said I didn't find some fun in this and at times was won over by Lohan. It is probably indicative of my up-and-down tastes, that have a tendency to get a bit schizophrenic...