MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE FINAL ANALYSIS

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I know. I'm really late getting this month's Foyeurism up. I had a Foyeurism written and ready to go for about a month. Then a Foyeurism-worthy movie came out that I decided I'd just add to that Foyeurism. And then the last week of July saw the release of a certain Lindsay Lohan movie that set a new standard for bad movies this year and I realized that was going to need a Foyeurism all of its own. So look on the bright side; next month's Foyeurism is locked in and ready to go. Unless something else truly worthy pops up at the last minute.

You'll also find there's been a major updating to both the Links page and the Archives section. The links to my old Ain't It Cool News reviews are gone. I've already reposted a couple of those reviews on my blog, which you'll find linked on the Archives page in that section, and I'll be reintroducing them little by little over the next few months. AICN's archives seem to suffer from severe formatting problems that made a lot of their older stuff (including mine) impossible to read. When I repost these reviews I also plan on improving a lot of the grammatical issues. Most people don't realize I was writing those on a computer with no spellcheck functions and I'd forgotten damn near everything I'd learned in writing class back in school. Yeah, as if I have perfect prose and grammar nowadays.

Head over to the Archives section and you'll find a load of reviews from both Dread Central and my blog that you may have missed out on, including my take on some very recent stinkers like WHO'S YOUR CADDY? and SKINWALKERS.

Now onto this month's stinkers. We got ourselves a warm-up act followed by a main event. Let's get ready to fumble!

 

I KNOW WHO REVIEWED ME

 

More like CRAPTIVITY

You gotta love Hollywood. Even in a movie with a sick and twisted scenario such as one in which beautiful women unattainable to the average man are abducted by a pair of serial-killing brothers who systematically torture the women, psychologically and physically, into having sex with one of them she's fooled into believing is another captive more concerned with her safety than his own, it's still the reasonably handsome brother - the one who doesn't look like he'd have too much trouble bagging a hot chick on his own - that gets to shag the traumatized girl. The older, balder, fatter, uglier brother, meanwhile, is left to declare how he's just happy getting to watch. Riiight...

Now before anyone stars screaming that I just spoiled the big surprise plot twist, I'd first like to point out that one cannot spoil a surprise plot twist so transparent that the moment the character in question appears on the screen you (should) immediately know something is up. A co-worker of mine is a huge horror fan and when I started telling her about how terrible this movie was one of the first things she asked me was if the guy in the other cell was in on it. She'd deduced this just from watching the trailers for the movie on television. Yeah, the shocking twist is that obvious.

There's a scene where our two captives are shown what looks like beat-up old 8mm footage - a home movie of the killer as child. We see a young boy in bed with his chain-smoking, drugged-up, incestuous mother, who is barely lucid at the time. He gets out of bed, picks up a knife, and guts her. Right away we know there has to be at least two killers involved in this film because, otherwise, who the hell filmed this home movie? Towards the end, when all has been revealed, this footage is run again, only this time it's the director's cut in which we see another boy standing in the doorway watching his brother shoving that knife into their mother's womb. See. Two killers. Now I just have one question. If one brother was killing mom and the other was standing in the doorway across the room, WHO THE HELL FILMED ALL THIS?!?!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you CAPTIVITY, the latest surefire candidate for worst movie of the year in year that's been ripe with worst movie of the year candidates, a motion picture where we're apparently supposed to believe the killers somehow magically recorded their own childhood memories for playback.

2007 has been like an embarrassment of riches when it comes to wretched movies and far too many of them have fallen into either the horror or thriller category. This one went from being so bad I was tempted to walkout during the first half to "Holy hot damn, I cannot believe how bad this is!" bad by the second half. The tiny audience I saw it (at least the ones that hadn't already bailed) were laughing heartily by the end; I was just agasp at how a movie already so terrible to begin with managed to comically derail even further.

Many have speculated that HOSTEL 2's flopping at the box office earlier this summer was a surefire sign that the torture porn genre was going the way of the dinosaur; I'd say that speculation’s a tad premature, especially with SAW sequels rapidly becoming a new Halloween tradition. CAPTIVITY, on the other hand, could very well be the death knell for the torture porn subgenre. Ah, heck, CAPTIVITY was so bad it could easily spell the death of cinema. Okay, that's taking things to the hyperbolic extreme. But then isn't taking things to the extremes what so-called torture porn is supposed to be all about?

And who in their right mind brings their young children to a movie of this type? The first thing I noticed entering the theater was that some of these people in the audience brought their kids, none of whom looked to be over the age of ten. Forget RATATOUILLE; let's take the kiddies to see the movie where a woman is systematically tortured into having sex with a psychopath? Screw the latest HARRY POTTER sequel; we’re taking your young’ens to see the movie where the pre-title sequence alones involves an acid-scarred woman having her skull smashed in with a sledgehammer. That's some quality parenting there.

Elisha Cuthbert plays Jennifer Tree, a beautiful fashion model. Being a beautiful fashion model is all there is to her character's depth. Well, she's also about as smart as a wet Nerf ball and she's one of those young female celebutantes who feel compelled to carry their cute little doggy with them to social functions. That dog thing alone makes me inclined to root for the psychos. It’s a dog – not a fashion accessory, people.

Jennifer's pictures are plastered all over the city as part of an ad campaign, but not once did I ever have a clue what exactly her image was supposed to be selling. She may have been selling herself from the looks of things.

Jennifer gets drugged and abducted from a NYC nightclub shindig by the unseen individual who had been stalking her with a video camera for the first ten minutes of the film. She'll awaken to find herself locked away in a dank room that still looks like it could be rented out for a good price tag in New York City. Her silent, hooded abductor, who is usually shown either from the neck down or from behind watching on monitors while sipping wine, keeps using a compartment to slide her stuff like food and keys to lockers within the room containing clothing and such.

Kim Bauer hasn't slept for years; still haunted to this day by memories of that cougar.

The first 20-minutes or so of CAPTIVITY had me sitting there wondering if this movie was designed to be the torture porn version of a Skinemax flick from the 1990's called PRIVATE OBSESSION, in which Shannon Whirry played a feminist fashion model (I know; doesn't that sound like an oxymoron?) abducted by an obsessed misogynist who kept her penned up in a cramped room, determined to break her will and make her his love slave. At least Shannon Whirry was nice enough to spend a considerable amount of that movie fully naked. Elisha Cuthbert on the other hand... You'd think a girl who calls Paris Hilton one of her best friends in the whole wide world would have fewer hang-ups over being filmed in the nude. Yet she denies us again here just as she did in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR where she played a porn star. Stuck up, bitch! Someone ought to abduct her and torture her until… I digress.

Jennifer isn't too fond of being kept captive by someone wanting to use her as his plaything, so she starts trashing the place like the end of a Who concert. This will lead to her first round of psychological torment in the form of sensory overload by way of super bright lights and deafening sounds filling the room. From then on, whenever she gets out of line, whether it be by refusing to play along or trying to escape, her mysterious captor will drug her, usually with knockout gas, and subject her to further torments.

CAPTIVITY may very well boast the most use of knockout gas since the old Adam West Batman TV show. By the time Jennifer attempted to escape by crawling her way up to the garage and jacking the car, only for knockout gas to begin spewing forth from the vehicle's air conditioning vents, I was beginning to wonder if maybe her captor was going to turn out to be The Joker or The Penguin.

The captor also like to occasionally go buck wild with a spruced-up shotgun, though use of it is clearly designed to scare the bejeezus out of her more than physically harm her. Not really much point to doing so, but since the climax requires use of a shotgun...

Jennifer's punishments usually begin with her awakening in this dentist's chair of sorts, strapped in while a faceless mute in a hooded cloak preps her punishment. For example, Jennifer's forced to watch video of a previous victim in the same chair having acid poured on her face. She then gets tricked into thinking the same is about to be done to her, only she'll faint from the stress and wake up back in her cell with a bloody bandage and prosthetic scar on her face.

Secret lair, knockout gas, and cruel practical jokes: this really could have been the work of The Joker.

The next extreme punishment has her captor tossing a bunch of fresh from the fridge human organs (Eyeballs too!) into a blender and force-feeding Jennifer a tasty Hannibal the Cannibal smoothie. Must have been too much deliciousness for young Jennifer to take; she again passes out from the trauma. No constitution, this woman. Whereas the acid bath was excessively gruesome, this attempt at grossing out the audience was just silly.

The silliest of the tortures will have her wake up in a Plexiglas box rapidly filling with sand. This looks like the sort of trap the Jigsaw killer from SAW would come up with if he started performing his self-help tortures as a stage act in Vegas.

Jennifer will be rescued from the sandbox of doom by a scruffy young man named Gary, the other captive from the cell next door who she'd briefly communicated with earlier upon realizing one of the walls of her cell was just a painted over window. For a movie that wants us to be surprised when it turns out he's in on it all, CAPTIVITY's screenplay does just about everything it can to make this twist obvious from the moment he's introduced. The way his character first appears seems suspicious enough, how he keeps saying things clearly designed to soothe her, the way their abductor keeps setting things up so that he'll look like a brave defender in her eyes, and, eventually, the way they're allowed to share the same cell almost as if their captor wants them to start humping. It should be painfully obvious to everyone watching that Gary isn't quite the knight in shining armor he wants Jennifer to think he is, but Jennifer's a dumb blonde, so this obviousness is totally lost on her.

One moment they both wake up to find the captor planning to rip out one of her tooth with a pair of pliers, which Gary volunteers for so that Jennifer won't have to suffer, and the next the two of them are back in their joint cell having sex. Not only is hard to believe they'd start getting it on this fast, the dude just had a molar wrenched out with pliers; shouldn't he be in extreme agony? The lengths some guys will go to get a hot chick in the sack.

Afterwards, while Jennifer is still asleep, Gary will use this opportunity to use a secret exit to sneak back upstairs to the two-story family home he shares with his obese brother Ben. That Ben must really love wearing robes given he'll spend the entire movie either in that cheap Emperor Palpatine robe or a bath robe. The two engage in a little post-coitus high-fiving, so to speak, although their behavior together struck me as more in line with an old gay couple, if you ask me.

They're brothers! Can't you tell?

It turns out the brothers run a catering service that they use to scope out potential victims that they use to scope out a woman and then abduct and psychologically torture her into having sex with Gary while Ben watches. Every television in the place is rigged to the closed circuit system below. Not only do the videotape their exploits, they even keep scrapbooks designed like manga comic books using photos of the victims, the bodies of which are still rotting down in the basement areas beneath their New York City townhouse. You’d those corpses would have started giving off an odor that would alert someone, but then they are in New York City so…

Ben talks about how it's time to dispose of Jennifer. Gary decides he wants to play with her a little longer and out-of-nowhere decides to stab his brother through the heart. No sooner is it finally revealed who is behind all this and what their objective is, one turns on the other and kills him? Thank goodness too; had that knife not found its way into Ben's portly chest we might have suddenly found ourselves subjected to an actual plot and maybe even some genuine character development as opposed to the series of dunderheaded vignettes in which a girl too stupid to live gets tormented into thinking the handsome stranger pretending to be tormented along with her is someone she might want to consider getting inseminated by without any thought to the person holding them hostage getting off on watching them do so.

And no sooner does Gary kill Ben than two police detectives show up on the doorstep looking for Ben to ask him questions about what he may have seen when he was catering the party from which Jennifer was abducted. Gary quickly drags his brother's corpse upstairs, hides the scrapbooks with the victims' names written in huge lettering on the spines inside a cupboard with a creaking door that won't stay closed, changes all the TV channels back to regular television, and makes up an excuse about his bro being out of town. The two inspectors are willing to accept that excuse until one of the cops gets freaked out by a roach commercial and changes the channel to the "Missing Woman We're Looking For Is Asleep Downstairs" Network. Unfortunately for the two of them, they hadn't changed the channel to the "Look Out For The Maniac With A Shotgun Behind You Network" instead.

To even be involved with such a scheme to begin with shows that Gary’s clearly insane, but that he still thinks he might be able to get away with it, along with his new girlfriend Jennifer no less, shows that Gary's also every bit as dumb as her. He tells her that he killed their captors (those two cops) and leads her upstairs so that they can escape. But first, he has to take care over some things. Now remember, Jennifer has the mental acumen of a bag of rock salt so she's actually buying all this.

What will finally tip Jennifer off that Gary isn't all that he seems:

A) The way Gary keeps preventing her from using the phone to call for help?

B) The way Gary tells her the reason he doesn't want her to use the phone is because he wants to get their sex tape first so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands once the cops do arrive?

C) The way she sees Gary on the monitor downstairs clearly scrubbing the place down so as to remove any and all fingerprints?

D) None of the above.

Sadly, D is the correct answer.

So what does finally make her realize what’s been obvious to everyone with a functioning brain? It’s a two-part process actually. First, it turns out Ben isn't actually dead.
Advice for anyone every trying to stab a fat man to death: because of the extra layer of fat you're going to have to push that knife in even harder, otherwise you'll just render the fat person unconscious for minutes at time instead.

Jennifer finishes off the heavy set man in a bath robe with a knife sticking out of his chest by pushing the knife in further. But that alone still was not enough. She then spots the scrapbooks in the cupboard thanks to the door creaking open again; not until she thumbs through one with a picture of Gary posing with the man in the bath robe she just killed does she fully realize the conspiracy.

Cue Gary realizing that she's onto him. Cue the dumb blonde deciding the best way to escape the house is to head back downstairs to the part of the house where there is no escape. Cue Gary taking the shotgun away from Jennifer and then doing the dumb villain routine of mocking the person that doesn't know how to fire a gun by showing them how to properly cock the firearm. Cue Jennifer getting the shotgun back and giving Gary the Sarah Connor treatment, making this the second terrible horror movie I've seen this year (THE HITCHER remake being the first) that has ended with a dumb babe with a shotgun blowing away the psycho. Cue me wondering, "Hey, whatever became of her doggy? They never told us what happened to the dog?"

Yet another one of her earlier torments had forced her to choose between blasting her dog with a shotgun or getting her own head blown off with one. A crying Jennifer chose to reduce her pooch to meat scraps only for it turning out to have been another cruel joke. It was actually look-a-like doggy she'd blown to smithereens. The hooded killer reveals the deception to further screw with her mind. I kept waiting for the pooch to come running into her arms at the end as she exited the house. Nope. That dog is never seen or heard from again. Guess they had to save something for the sequel inevitable sequel. I think Michael Vick and Ving Rhames are going to play the killers in that one.

The executive producer of CAPTIVITY was Courtney Solomon, the same guy who made DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. That explains a lot, doesn’t it?

The wrong movie was called SUPERBAD

Many movies are good; few are truly great. Even more movies are bad; even fewer are so bad they're good. Whether Lindsay Lohan's I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is so bad it's good is a matter for debate, but I am sure it achieves that rarest of bad movie status: MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED.

This level of badness requires effort. You simply cannot make a movie that achieves the levels of badness that I KNOW WHO KILLED ME does without having started out with loftier goals; and I assure you that the degree of badness on display shows that I KNOW WHO KILLED ME was a Herculean effort on the part of the filmmakers. What he have here is a perfect storm of bad cinema: a tabloid fodder actress trying to change her on-screen image even though it's her off-screen image that needs changing, a hopelessly preposterous screenplay that not even a director created by Dr. Frankenstein from the parts of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Lamberto Bava, Tod Browning, and Brian DePalma could make into a workable film, and a director who is most certainly not a Frankenstein's Monster of a director comprised from the parts of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Lamberto Bava, Tod Browning, and Brian DePalma couldn't make into a workable movie - but he's hellbent to give it a go.

Strange as this may sound, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME invoked memories of LEONARD PART 6. There's a sequence in that all-time bad Bill Cosby comedy where Cosby performs ballet as a means by which to successfully fight off some villainous henchmen wearing silly bird costumes. Terrible to such a degree it become downright surreal, not just because there's a man using full contact ballet to ward off thugs in tacky bird costumes, but also because it's all somewhat artistically shot using shadow and light. That fight scene is the epitome of true WTF-ness; you can only watch and wonder what the hell the makers of this movie thinking were. Long stretches of I KNOW WHO KILLED ME evoked that same sentiment.

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is truly a high concept movie in the sense that everyone involved with the making of it had to have been high. In Lohan's case, that's a given. What's everyone else's excuse?

A young actress who has it in her head that she needs to shed her squeaky clean teen image by taking on a role that shows her doing things of a more adult nature. Young actresses do this all the time. Problem is Lindsay Lohan is a young actress whose squeaky clean image exists solely on the screen. Lohan is like a celebrity version of Jekyll & Hyde: Annette Funicello in front of the camera, Courtney Love when she's not. Having starred in a series of family friendly Disney productions and the hit film MEAN GIRLS (in which she played the nice girl), Lohan's decided she wants change her screen image to something more adult - fitting given that she's now old enough to be tried as one. It's now reached the point now where it has become impossible to watch a movie like I KNOW WHO KILLED ME and not take into account Lohan's real-life antics. She's shown stripping on stage, smoking cigarettes non-stop, swearing up a storm, having casual sex with guy she doesn't know, and generally behaving like a dumb skank. In other words, her public persona. Her character will denounce her mom as a "stupid, drunken, crack whore," a scene hard not to snicker at given both Lohan's own recent rehab stints and all the tabloid reports of her own mom's equally dubious behavior.

"I'm a star. I'm a big, bright, shining star."

I'd say this is not the kind of extreme makeover Lindsay Lohan's life and career is in dire need of, but at this point I think the girl could be cast as Pippi Longstocking and audiences would joke that the reason her pigtails point straight up is from the cocaine high. I'm thinking the best thing for Lohan would be to star in a sequel to ANNIE where she'd play Little Orphan Annie all grown up and transformed into a Paris Hilton-like celebutaunte. Oh, the fun there would be seeing a flabbergasted Daddy Warbucks using his vast fortune to buy back her sex tape before it hits the world wide web, a liquored up Annie telling the "bald old bastard" to mind his own business because it's her life, and, ultimately, sending her to drug rehab where there will be a scene in which she belts out a torch song version of "The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow". I bet we could get Neal Moritz to produce it.

It's gotten so bad of late for Lohan that just three weeks after her latest arrest, what movie is rebroadcast on ABC's Wonderful World of Disney? CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE DRAMA QUEEN. That film boasts a now unintentionally hilarious scene where Lohan's character gets to meet her favorite celebrity and ends up highly disappointed to discover he's an alcoholic - even denouncing him to his face as being nothing more than a pathetic drunk. No way in hell the re-airing of this movie at this time was a mere coincidence of scheduling on the part of the ABC Network that's owned by Disney. No way in hell I'm believing this to be anything other than sarcasm on the part of the house of mouse.

Time to play "Spot the Cokehead"

The second ingredient needed in achieving this zenith of badness is an ambitious director who overreaches to a wild degree. I cannot bring myself to say anything truly negative about director Chris Silvertson since he was the co-writer of one of the greatest b-movies of the 21st century. But that doesn't mean he didn't contribute heavily to the I KNOW WHO KILLED ME clusterfuck. Being artsy with the direction and stylish with the visuals is one thing, what Silvertson does here is a whole other ballgame. He seems to have been trying to channel the visual flare of David Lynch and Oliver Stone with his use of thematic color schemes, surreal imagery, and senseless symbolism. Unfortunately, the Lynch he ended up channeling was BOXING HELENA director Jennifer Lynch and the Oliver Stone he emulated was the Oliver Stone zonked out of his mind after smoking a car trunk full of hash. By the time Lohan's character has a dream about this guy with an angel-winged heart tattoo on his chest that becomes animated and begins flapping its wings while the person it adorns is talking all pseudo-spiritual about how the heart connects to the rest of one's self, filmed in soft light and posing in an almost religious stance, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME officially bypassed pretentious to becoming the most masturbatory exercise in nonsensical visual overkill since ULTRAVIOLET.

If your favorite color is blue then chances are you will love this film. The killer is blue, his weapons are blue, flowers are blue, many of the dreams and flashbacks are filmed with a blue hue to them: everything's blue! Fitting too given how much this movie blew. That joke works better when spoken aloud.

Personally, I think the direction of the film was the equivalent of the old analogy about a guy buying an expensive flashy sports car to overcompensate for a certain bodily deficiency.

This brings us to that deficiency, the last ingredient needed to make such glorious cheesecake: the script. The story plays out like it written by a novice screenwriter who loves Italian giallos, worships at the altar of BLUE VELVET, and considers COLOR OF NIGHT to be a brilliant psychological thriller. I usually find myself complaining about screenwriters lacking imagination and being unwilling to run wild with their ideas. In light of this motion picture I find myself needing to amend that complaint to being imaginative while still maintaining a necessary degree of plausibility. You'll understand why in a few moments.

Whether or not the director's excessive visuals were his way of trying to overcome the screenplay's unbelievability or just a case of an over enthusiastic cook following the recipe of a mad chef isn't something that can be determined merely from watching I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. But toss Lindsay Lohan into the pot and you got yourself something that manages to be both half-baked and over-cooked all at the same time.

Keep in mind what you're about to read barely even scratches the surface of this film's layers of badness. One simply cannot do it full justice in print, in part because so much of the film's tacky wackiness hinges on the director's visual excesses. As I stated in the opening paragraph: I KNOW WHO KILLED ME simply has to be seen to be believed.

Lindsay Lohan plays Aubrey Fleming, just your average, goody two shoes, teenage girl from an affluent family. She's a piano prodigy, though she tells her piano teacher she's lost interest. She loves writing short stories, which she's shown all-throughout the film reading to her class. Her football jock boyfriend is constantly trying to get into her pants to no avail, yet Aubrey has no problem flirting with the scummy-looking gardener with the nipple tattoo. She then disappears after going out for the evening with some friends.

There's a serial killer on the loose in this otherwise idyllic WASP-centric town, one who preys on young women. The killer's m.o. is abduction and then systematically removing fingers, then hands and feet, all the while pumping the victims full of amphetamines in order to keep them wide awake during the weeks long ordeal. The bodies are later dumped in a manner that guarantees the victim will die on their own (i.e. drowning, buried alive). For whatever reason, and when it comes to this killer's motives "whatever reason" is all there is, the killer isn't keen on actually killing the victim himself. He's got no problem sandwiching their body parts in dry ice until extreme frostbite sets in and skin is literally peeling off the blackened appendages, but actually killing them with his bare hands is out of the question. The fundamental problem with that logic is that he still dumps their living bodies in ways guarantee they'll soon expire, so he's still technically killing them himself. Damn those technicalities!

The early portion of I KNOW WHO KILLED ME plays like a torture porn version of KISS THE GIRLS. These scenes want to have their cake and eat it too by being gruesomely graphic while still pulling back before truly crossing the line into Eli Roth territory.

The killer has a thing for the color blue. Silent and faceless until the end, we do see that he dresses like Dale Gribble from the animated show King of the Hill but with a Blue Man Group fetish: blue surgical gloves, blue clothing, blue baseball cap, blue stocking over his face, and even his weapons are blue. He wields a collection of funky looking knives forged from what appears to be blue crystal. One thing will become extremely apparent before the movie's end: the screenplay put more thought into the killer's thematic color scheme than in his actual motivations for perpetrating his crimes.

Did the killer purchase his weapons at Crystar's garage sale?

The screenplay even throws out some red herrings that are so obviously red herrings you never buy into any of them. Could the killer be the skuzzy gardener with the tattooed nipple Aubrey flirted with and then flipped off? What about that guy with the scary head whose menacing mug pops up more than once at random places for no apparent reason? Scary-headed guy, who was always shot in profile from the side, looked a little like Willem Dafoe in SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE. Now if the screenplay had actually been bold enough to reveal the killer was actually Nosferatu... Frankly, making the killer a vampire wouldn't have been anymore far-fetched.

Aubrey's body is found on the side of the road. She's alive, though she's missing a hand and a foot. Her parents are ecstatic that she's alive at all. The cops are baffled because she'd only been missing for 17 days and the killer usually holds them much longer. But she insists that she's not this Aubrey Fleming but actually a stripper named Dakota Moss. The police, the psychologists, and Aubrey's parents all believe that she is Aubrey; she's just been so traumatized by her ordeal that she's snapped and developed an alternate personality in order to cope. This Dakota Moss chick seems to suffer from a highly subjective form of amnesia in that she can remember pretty much everything she needs to remember except the stuff the script doesn't want her to remember because if she did then there'd be no reason to jerk us around for the next hour.

Dakota can remember her name, that she lives elsewhere, that she works in a strip club, and continues to angrily protest that she's not Aubrey Fleming. But does Dakota ever say to anyone, "Hey, if you don't believe me then here's the address of my apartment and the strip club I work at"? Do the cops ever ask her for her home address or the name of the strip club so that they can go confirm her story? Of course not. Because of if they did then, again, there wouldn't be a good reason to jerk us around for the next hour.

If I may pause for a moment to comment on the FBI agents hunting for the killer - they're idiots! Just what I wrote in the previous paragraph should be enough to tell you that these are not the best and brightest investigators on the case. Their piss poor investigative skills become even more apparent when the killer and his ties to the previous victims are revealed.

The lead investigator is played by Garcelle Beauvais-Nilson, an actress who coincided the release of this film with her own centerfold spread in Playboy magazine. I should also mention that Mr. & Mrs. Fleming are played by Neal McDonough and Julia Ormond. I believe they coincided the release of this film by being filled with shame.

Given that Julia Ormond went from being an almost A-list, award-winning actress to playing the supporting role of Lindsay Lohan's mom in an all-time turkey like this, shouldn't she be the one sitting on the couch in a state of shock in need of consoling?

It must also be said that for someone looking to change their on-screen image to something more adult, Lindsay Lohan's turn as tough girl Dakota comes across way too forced and phony. Here's this young woman raised in poverty by a crack addict mom who died of an overdose, forced to all but sell her body to scummy men in a seedy strip joint, and now she finds herself short two essential body parts and being told by all the strangers around her that she's actually an entirely different human being; and yet Lohan's performance as Dakota plays more like that of a surly teenager angry because her parents have grounded her on homecoming weekend.

She also keeps her clothes on. Lohan has more than one flashback that is little more than an extended stripping scene during which she never actually strips. Men in grungy strip clubs are apparently willing to spend money on a girl dressed like a Pussycat Doll with more freckles on her body than a Trill who slithers around on a stage without ever disrobing further. Lohan even has a sex scene where she'll never even take her bra off. You got underwear-free starlets flashing their hoo-ha's for paparazzi just getting out of cars when going out for a night on the town, but Lohan won't show any real skin when playing a horny stripper in a movie designed to show her in a more adult light to begin with. What's the point?

The director also loved to focus on her physical deformities to a degree not seen since Gary Oldman in HANNIBAL. He used any chance he got to give us a good clean shot of her scarred up stumps, almost as if he was afraid we'd forget if he didn't.

Aubrey eventually relents and decides to go along with the whole Aubrey Fleming charade even though she'll continue insisting that she's actually Dakota Moss: flame-haired, uber-freckled, differently-abled, pole dancer jour.

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME was fairly mundane stuff up until here. This is where the spontaneous bleeding incidents, random fainting spells, and all the overwrought artsy fartsy stuff really kicks in. Aubrey/Dakota will start having a series of hyper-stylized flashbacks/dream sequences/who the hell know. It's all part of the trickery. Is she really Dakota and therefore these memories are actual memories or is she Aubrey and these flashbacks are all part of her imagination trying to make her think they're memories? The only thing that really matters about them is that they are all filmed in dream-like fashion and, in retrospect, once everything is revealed; some of them won't have made a lick of sense. Hard to complain too much about that since little of I KNOW WHO KILLED ME will make a lick of sense.

And at this point an otherwise far-fetched serial killer/dual identity movie goes completely wacko as Lindsay Lohan gets outfitted with a robotic hand that would make Luke Skywalker envious. I'm not up to speed on the latest in amputee prosthetics but I find it hard to believe that they've achieved the level of technology shown in this movie. Her robo hand (before they put the skin-colored rubber dishwashing glove over it) looks virtually identical to the one seen in ROBOCOP when Miguel Ferrer's character shook hands with the disembodied robotic hand that was soon to be attached to his pet project. Her Bionic Woman hand also makes a constant mechanical whirring sound whenever she used it that if it were me, the constant sound of it would have eventually become like Chinese water torture. Personally, after awhile of having to hear that perpetual noise I'd probably have been begging the docs to lose it and just give me a hook instead.

Not to be outdone, she also is gifted with a robotic foot that looks more like a skin colored moonboot with a tiny panel of lights that make a "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" sound when the battery is low. It has to be plugged into the wall to charge up or else the power supply will eventually run out and it'll be like dragging a lead foot. You'd think her far more energy-consuming cybernetic hand would also require plugging into the wall too, but you'd be wrong. I must express my amazement that the movie somehow resisted the urge to include a scene where her foot started beeping while she was trying to hide from the killer. I wish whenever her foot had ran out energy it would have begun beeping along with a narrator voiceover declaring, "Due to Earth's polluted atmosphere, Lindsay Lohan's robotic foot can only maintain power for three minutes."

That was an old Ultraman reference, by the way. I fully realize I occasionally venture into Dennis Miller territory when it comes to pop culture obscurity. You should all be used to it by now.

Home she goes with Aubrey's parents, still declaring she's a stripper named Dakota. They're tolerant people, though Mr. Fleming's reactions have an aire of suspicion to them. Mrs. Fleming, however, could be a candidate for sainthood given her tolerance for what happens next.

The jock boyfriend comes over to meet with Aubrey, who hobbles down without her foot on because she forgot to plug it in. He decides to jog her memory by planting a kiss on her, to which she then bites his lip and says, "Did Aubrey ever do that?" Undeterred, he goes deep again. She reciprocates. Next thing you know she's telling mom they're going upstairs to have very loud sex. She rolls over afterwards, lights up a cigarette, and asks him, "Did Aubrey ever fuck you like that? Did she ever fuck you at all?" Personally, I'm thinking there are other ways she could have convinced this mental midget that she's not really Aubrey, but - hey, stumpy wanted some nookie.

Well, it worked. Jockstrap McFuckedstupid now decides to help her slip past all the cops stationed outside the house by hiding her in the truck of the car and distracting them with talk of needing to go to the store to buy more condoms. Like true professionals, these law enforcers all just laugh and resist the urge to begin high-fiving him. Yeah, like banging Lindsay Lohan is really an exclusive club. Her nickname's "Firecrotch", you know?

Lindsay Lohan on any given Saturday night

He drops her off at the home of the serial killer's previous victim and then departs the film. Good riddance. Dakota proceeds to question the deceased schoolmate's parents and then goes looking around the girl's still intact bedroom for clues. I KNOW WHO KILLED ME had now transformed into the most screwed-up Nancy Drew mystery ever, what with this Nancy Drew being a chain-smoking, double amputee, Six Million Dollar Woman with whorish tendencies in hot pursuit of a brutal serial killer that gets off on torturing and dismembering young women with dry ice and weapons that look worthy of a Masters of the Universe action figure.

And it now gets better or worse depending on your point of view. Enter the real-life Art Bell, former host of the radio talk show AM Coast to Coast, a program that specialized in UFOs, all things paranormal, and every crackpot government conspiracy theory you can imagine. He appears in this movie as himself to try and explain a central part of the plot's conundrum. Lohan starts Googling random words describing her situation and immediately happens upon a website with a video hosted by Art Bell explaining (Brace yourselves, folks!) the phenomenon of non-religious identical twin stigmata. The video tells the tale of a man in the early 20th century who was involved in a card game that resulted in a dispute that led to him being killed by a gunshot to the throat. At that very moment across town, the man's identical twin brother was sound asleep in his bed when he suddenly developed a bullet wound in the very same spot in his throat and died. Non-religious identical twin stigmata (to put it in simpler terms) is what this movie is expounding as the explanation for what is going on with the Aubrey/Dakota situation. It's basically the whole Corsican Brothers deal where one feels pain and so does the other, only in this case we're supposed to believe that when one twin has a hand or a foot cut off, the other's same body part just spontaneously rots and falls off. I shit you not!

A gigantic a leap of faith as that explanation wants us to buy into, we're also supposed to believe that a woman who had one of her fingers spontaneously come off with no discernable reason as to why would react to this by merely bandaging up her bloody hand, ride the bus home from work, possibly hook up with a guy she met on this bus ride (that part may have been a dream, I'm still not sure), and then get home where she'll try to re-attach her blackened severed finger using a piece of wire and some thread? Are you kidding me?!?! For the love of all that is holy...

Even better (or worse), when Dakota is shown in her flashback removing her glove and having her finger plop off, bleeding all over the place, passing out from the pain; she tells her boss that she's not going to the hospital because, as she puts it, "Hospitals are for rich people." I don't care how poor I am, when limbs start spontaneously falling off, I'm going to the damn hospital!

Okay, let's pretend that this isn't entirely too much to swallow. Let's assume that you're willing to go along for the ride and accept this. Nowhere in any of this explanation about non-religious identical twin stigmata did Mr. Art Bell ever state that it also gives people psychic visions. Perhaps there was another Art Bell video on that website she could have clicked on for even more information explaining why she suddenly has a psychic vision in the full-length bedroom mirror where she sees Aubrey in some sort of fancy dress out in a field next to an open grave kneeling before the killer who promptly wallops upside the head with a shovel. Maybe if she was seeing this from Aubrey's P.O.V. one could argue it being their psychic bond. Instead she sees it from a distant third-person perspective, and I don't recall her even showing any of the pain you'd think she was feeling from Aubrey getting bonked with the shovel.

It's not even just this one perspective either. The director just goes nuts with footage of this owl perched on a tree branch, sometimes filling up the entire full-length mirror almost making it seem like some sort of human-sized monster owl that attacks people through their vanity mirrors. What was with this owl? We'll even see more of it later on. But why? Was the owl in the mirror supposed to be symbolic of the existential question as to how many licks with a shovel does it take to get to the center of Lindsay Lohan's skull?

See what I mean about this movie having layers upon layers of bad? At this point do I even need to make snarky comments? Shouldn't the very description of what this movie is all about be humorous enough? Yes, I do believe I KNOW WHO KILLED ME may very well be a masterwork of suck.

I want that owl nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I don't know what rules have to be changed to make it happen but someone better make it happen.

It even turns out that Aubrey's latest short story was about a young stripper named Dakota. It's a two-way street of psychic improbability.

Dakota will once again make like a physically deformed Nancy Drew (now with dual action robotic and psychic enhancements) and unravels the double whammy revelation that, yes, she is indeed who she's been claiming to be as well as deducing the identity of the killer. The baby Mrs. Fleming gave birth to died during child birth. Unbeknownst to her, Mr. Fleming, being the well-meaning rich scumbag he is went down the hallway and made a deal with a crack whore to purchase one of her twins. A quick switch was made and nobody knew the wiser. The blonde-haired dad and the brunette mom raised the red-haired Aubrey without anyone knowing or suspecting the wiser while Dakota was stuck with a drug addict mom and a life of hard knocks until the day her body parts began spontaneously falling off and she collapsed on the side of the road while walking to the Fleming's tranquil community because of a hunch she had that this place held the truth about her what was happening to her. Do I even need to keep making any snarky comments anymore at this point?

This is why dad has began behaving suspiciously guilt-ridden the moment Aubrey started claiming she Dakota Moss, the daughter of a deceased crackhead from Parts Unknown, USA. An argument ensues and Dakota bolts to the cemetery as fast as a girl with a robotic club foot running low on power can. The script makes when her robotic foot going dead an inconvenience only as a matter of its own convenience.

She runs to a tombstone marked "Aubrey Fleming" that magically morphs into the name of the previously dead girl. She picks up a prize ribbon with a message from the piano teacher that leads to a hallucinatory split screen of the two Lohan's simultaneously repeating the familiar message written on the ribbon. Honestly now, by this point someone on the film set should have taken the director aside and just started slapping him until he promised to behave.

Anyway, Mr. Fleming had given chase. As soon as he happens upon her at the grave site Dakota turns around and emphatically says to him the film's title. Yep, she actually says the movie's title. And now that they know who killed me, now that they know who has Aubrey, who's behind it all, where they might be able to go to find her still alive, they proceed to not call the cops and drive to the killer's house out in the woods by themselves. They're unarmed and going after a vicious serial killer; why the hell would they need to call the authorities? Who needs police back-up when you're making a citizen's arrest of a homicidal maniac?

Needless to say, dad ends up quickly dead and Dakota is left to play peg-legged Jennifer Love Hewitt to the psycho Smurf's psychopathic fisherman.

I KNOW WHO KILLED ME LAST SUMMER

The killer has a basement "lair" that's filled with prosthetic legs hanging from meat hooks though. Sure. Why not?

The killer will get one of his own hands cut off after Dakota bionic grips his arm with her mechanical hand and saws his hand off with one of his own blue glass knives. The killer's reaction will be to rush upstairs screaming, put the severed hand in a bowl of ice, and then sit down at the piano to try and play the piano with just one hand, his bloody stump still gushing the whole time. Why the piano? Because he's the piano teacher, of course! His victims have been his female piano students and his m.o. has been to cut off one of their playing hands and the foot they work the pedal with. And the authorities never even considered him a suspect him! Worst cops ever!

And he would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for this part-human/part-cyborg psychic stripper and her meddling twin. Would it shock you to know that the tiny audience I saw this movie with at a (highly appropriate) midnight screening were howling with laughter during pretty much the entire third act?

Most of the killer's dialogue during this finale will consist of the sort of sorrowful loud moans that usually comes out of the mouths of angry homicidal mongoloids in movies - even before she stabs him in the throat with one of his knives. The psycho piano teacher will die clutching a bunch of those hanging prosthetic legs, almost as if he's hugging someone he loved goodbye.

Dakota then rushes out to the woods, finds the grave where Aubrey has been buried alive, digs her out, and rescues her. They lay next to one another in some sort of strange embrace. The direction starts getting all artsy and symbolic again. The end.

I've been told by someone on the Dread Central message boards who I believe to be a Hollywood screenwriter himself that there was an extra scene at the end in the original script that either wasn't filmed or got cut out. He claimed this ending would have put a whole new explanation on everything in an even worse way. Hard to imagine, I say. He never told me what this big twist was but my money's on it all having been a dream or one of Aubrey's short stories. Maybe they had Art Bell pull a Rod Serling at the end and explain everything that had happened was a result of an Illuminati conspiracy involving alien DNA, shape-shifting reptile people, and chemtrails. Why not? It's not like it would make things any more ludicrous.

I don't know what more I can say about this film other than, "Holy crap is I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is destined to become a bad movie classic!" Call me crazy - I am, but this may very well be the bad movie event of 2007. No surprise it flopped at the box office, no surprise it was slaughtered by critics, but what was a surprise was seeing some of the top horror websites give this film a pass. Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, and even my own Dread Central all gave it borderline rave reviews, going so far to call it a potentially misunderstood masterpiece. Is it any wonder why the good taste of horror movie fans is always being questioned? It may very well be a masterpiece of cinematic schlockola, but a good movie this is not and never will be.

If only someone in Hollywood had been enterprising enough to have released I KNOW WHO KILLED me as the second half of a GRINDHOUSE-style double feature proceeded by THE NUMBER 23 and separated by trailers for THR3E, PERFECT STRANGER, DEAD SILENCE, and THE REAPING. What a year this has been for plot twist improbabilities.

IN MEMORY OF LINDSAY LOHAN'S CAREER
NEXT STOP: PRISON, VH1, OR THE GRAVE?

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE COLOR OF NIGHT