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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 7/27/07)
Zero stars

Given that Sony declined to pre-screen this “thriller” for critics, I can’t say I was too surprised by how risible, grotesque, and incoherent I Know Who Killed Me is. But I can’t say I was prepared for its pretentiousness. If the picture has any use at all, it’s as a case study in what happens when the talentless attempt to emulate the inspired.

I should say right away that when I say “talentless” I’m not referring to the picture’s troubled star, Lindsay Lohan, who’s a frequently engaging performer. She is lousy here, but so’s everyone else; the acting across the board is pretty much on the level of a jumped-up Murder, She Wrote episode. No, the main culprits here are director Chris Sivertson and writer Jeffrey Hammond.

After a credit sequence featuring Lohan mysteriously bleeding as she works a strip pole, the picture looks like pretty standard Hollywood stuff. There’s the high school filled with students in their ‘20s; there’s Lohan as Aubrey, an imaginative, gifted, pampered student; there’s the football player who courts her with a blue rose. The blue rose cuing a lot of, um, blue imagery, as in blue-tinted freeze-frames of the football game. Later, when Aubrey’s kidnapped, her blue-glove-wearing tormenter chops off varied digits and limbs using blue tools. Blue, you see, as opposed to red. The usual color of roses. And the color of blood. Aubrey inexplicably escapes from her tormenter, minus an arm and a leg, and once she comes to in a hospital bed, she insists she’s not Aubrey at all, but a young stripper named Dakota. This causes much consternation to her parents (McDonough and Ormond — remember her? — Ormond here personifying the sad fact that an actress may lead a decent, sober personal life and still wind up with her career in the crapper) and the two bone-dumb FBI agents investigating the case (Beauvais and Jeb Bush doppelganger Garrett), who seem to believe that haranguing the clearly traumatized victim rather than checking out her story or interrogating her friends and associates is the way to go. In her efforts to convince those around her that she’s in fact Dakota and not Aubrey, she seduces Aubrey’s football player, in a truly unusual scene that may, for some viewers, evoke fond memories of the halcyon days of porn star Long Jean Silver.

Not that any of this matters in the least. Whatever rails I Know were on in the first place, it jumps them once the plot delves into such phenomena as “non-religious stigmata,” an example of which is enacted here by a character named Joseph K. — get it? The shots of the severing of various extremities and the generous infected-wound imagery place the movie in the realm of torture-you-know-what; but the moviemakers’ attempts to tie such stuff in with more, ahem, profound concerns suggests that these guys don’t wanna be Eli Roth — they wanna be Guy Maddin, or David Lynch, or some other master of the purposefully icky who my readers will forgive me for not remembering. They fail, most miserably and most forgettably. But you, dear reader, can avoid the process of forgetting altogether merely by skipping the film.

— Glenn Kenny