I Know Who Killed Me
I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is a great title. Not for a Lindsey Lohan movie but maybe a Ralph Meeker 50's film noir with a really cool painted one sheet poster. Very seedy, filled with guns, booze and strippers. But it's not, instead it's Lohan's "mature" movie debut where on screen she drinks, smokes and fucks just like a grown up. I doubt she picked the project herself and you gotta really wonder why someone read this script and said "this is perfect for Lindsey", but they did and so here we are. Maybe it was the antidote to The PARENT TRAP which LL had done in her younger days since both have a twin theme, well sort of. Gotta be careful, don't wanna give anything away. It starts with LL in red on stage at a strip club, not stripping for some fucking reason. I blame director Chris Sivertson. Maybe he didn't know that LL a bit of a party girl so he didn't push the nudity. We then meet another LL or is it the same one? That's the basic plot engine for the next ninety minutes. This version is named Audrey, who seems to basically be a good enough girl. She's a student,takes piano lessons and comes from an affluent family. She goes missing after a football game, as have some other girls in the region. One girl's corpse turns up mutilated and the FBI is in a rush to catch the murderer. About this time director Sivertson hits us with his "blue" motif. We get blue roses, the killer's gloves, his torture tools, and so on. We see Audrey being tortured with dry ice and weird glass knives, but not her actual captor. The gore is slightly gruesome but not at a HOSTEL level. A still alive girl, believed to be Audrey shows up . Her hand and leg are mutilated, requiring amputation. Trouble is when she comes to she's says she's not Audrey but Dakota, who is a skanky stripper, now without a leg. Oh yeah, Dakota likes the color red. That's two amputee stripper movies this past year, the other being PLANET TERROR. So she gets prosthetic limbs, the hand even has some sort of kung fu grip. Everyone thinks she is just in shock and she will come out of it eventually. She can't remember anything about her captivity or her captor which annoys the FBI. Dakota, being a bad girl, fucks Audrey's boyfriend in a fairly tame sex scene. There's no nudity or even any creepy amputee shots and she even keeps her bra on. The boyfriend is pretty fucking clueless but I guess Dakota's a better fuck so he goes with it.
Several bizarre dreams and flashbacks eventually stir up Dakota's curiosity so she goes to the internet for answers. She recalls her weird finger gangrene incident that happened a little while back. Her finger basically falls off at the strip club just about the same time Audrey went missing. Hmmm, curious. I guess I should mention the screenplay by WGA writer Jeff Hammond. Just fucking awful, stay on strike Jeff. So, at this point Art Bell appears via the internet to basically explain the whole stupid fucking mess to Dakota and us. Some bullshit about twins miles apart developing sympathetic wounds for no apparent reason. The parents deny that Audrey had a twin but maybe someone's lying? It all limps along till Dakota/Audrey has a flash and says the title before racing off to find the killer who you probably guessed a long time ago.
The whole plot reminded me of something DePalma might've tried back in the eighties or even during his inexplicable RAISING CAIN. I suppose the twin gimmick was meant to have a big shocking twist feel but you never really buy into it. LL never does anything shocking or sexy, not enough to even get the "I just wanna see her naked" crowd. There's something approaching a giallo feel in the killer's house where LL comes across a creepy cellar of hanging prosthetic limbs but Sivertson doesn't have the chops to make it special. It really needed to be weirder, maybe in the style of an early seventies giallo, where the ludicrous plot gimmick would just be something you rolled with because the visuals and music were so trippy and cool. But Sivertson is no Argento. It's also not "bad" enough like a SHOWGIRLS to interest the camp crowd. Personally, I would've like to see a deranged chimp in there somewhere. It's not really LL's fault, she does what she can I suppose. It's just not enough of anything. Just go watch DRESSED TO KILL instead. At least it has Michael Caine in drag.