Raspberry Picking: I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at I Know Who Killed Me, winner of a whopping eight Razzies including Worst Picture (a record that stood until Jack and Jill fell down the hill in 2012) and the final nail in the coffins of multiple careers.

In 2005, Lindsay Lohan was riding high, carried wherever she went on a throne of money donated by the young adult set. Her breakout in the reboot of The Parent Trap (1998) catapulted her to child stardom. Freaky Friday (2003) and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004) both netted her Teen Choice Awards, and the former even garnered modest acclaim from respectable critics. By the time she struck gold with the much-beloved Mean Girls (2005), her place among Hollywood’s darlings seemed unshakeable.

And then came the drugs. And the DUIs. With the drugs and DUIs came the jokes and the nonstop bad publicity. Lohan, whom seconds before everyone had regarded as a young woman well on her way to a Serious Acting Career, got the Britney Spears treatment from the tabloids. All of this coincided nicely with the release of I Know Who Killed Me, an intensely weird psychological thriller starring Lohan in a dual lead role that was clearly meant to signal the new, edgy phase of Lohan’s career.

It didn’t go well. Production on the film halted again and again due to Lohan’s medical problems. Paparazzi held the set under siege. Lohan’s arrests prevented her from helping with the film’s promotion. The film’s trailers spoiled its Big Twist. No doubt hindered by its star’s plummeting reputation, I Know Who Killed Me belly-flopped into theaters with a paltry $3.5-million domestic box office against the film’s $12 million budget. And to no one’s surprise given that perfect combination, the Golden Raspberry Awards had a field day with it, even creating a new bonus award for 2008 (“Worst Excuse for a Horror Movie”) to ensure that it beat out the old win record held jointly by Showgirls and Battlefield Earth.

Today, Lohan regards I Know Who Killed Me as an old shame. Its director, Chris Sivertson, whose career also curled up and died following the film’s failure, is another story. He has fiercely defended the film, its script, and its star’s performance, and he periodically threatens to release a three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. He’s also not alone. I Know Who Killed Me hasn’t exactly had a reappraisal, but the film has its share of devoted fans, and viewers have started to take note of the more unusual aspects of the film. So where are we? Am I ready to join its legions of defenders?

THE STORY

Maybe, but first I have to get past the story, because that element of I Know Who Killed Me is just about as wretched as its record would suggest.

(A quick note: it’s going to be much easier for me to talk about the story if I don’t have to worry about spoilers, so please consider this section a Spoiler Zone and proceed accordingly.)

Lohan plays Aubrey Fleming, a plucky high school senior overachiever. She’s a super talented pianist and writer and she’s going to Yale and she’s popular and she’s dating a football player (Brian Geraghty) but of course she’s much too mature and serious for him, so naturally she’s a prime target for the mysterious serial killer targeting beautiful and talented young women. She’s also looking to simplify her life somewhat, so she quits piano, much to the dismay of her piano teacher Mr. Norquist (Thomas Tofel), who may as well be wearing a big flashing sign that says I AM THE BAD GUY.

Aubrey goes missing after a big football game, and her terrified parents (Neal McDonough and Julia Ormond) naturally fear that she’s been taken by the same killer who murdered Aubrey’s schoolmate Jennifer Toland. Some FBI agents (Garcelle Beauvais and Spencer Garrett), who are dickish and incompetent even for movie FBI agents, get involved. These FBI agents are so clueless that among the connections they fail to make are that the murder/kidnap victims were students of the same piano teacher. Later on, they will fail to remember that identical twins carry the same DNA.

Weeks later, a girl who looks exactly like Aubrey is found by the side of the road, barely alive and with a hand and a leg missing. Everyone assumes this is Aubrey, but the girl insists that she is not Aubrey, that she is a rundown stripper named Dakota Moss. As everyone else works to get to the bottom of what they assume is Aubrey’s delusion, Dakota experiences unexplained injuries, like a spontaneous stab wound on her forearm. It turns out she’s been experiencing these unexplained injuries ever since Aubrey Fleming’s disappearance. In case we can’t connect the dots on our own, I Know Who Killed Me helpfully intercuts Dakota’s injuries with shots of Aubrey, still being held by the killer, experiencing exactly the same injuries. So Dakota, too, becomes determined to find out what became of Aubrey, and what her connection is to the missing girl.

The movie’s screenwriter, Jeff Hammond, appears to earnestly believe that this is clever. I frankly do not know what to tell him.

THE BAD

Beyond the story, I have reservations about calling too much of the movie “bad,” but it does spend a good deal of its runtime tripping over its own overexcited feet.

Here’s what I can tell you about director Chris Sivertson: he loves David Lynch. A lot. Like, really a lot. I would say you should find yourself a partner who loves you the way Chris Sivertson loves David Lynch, but you probably don’t want a partner who attempts to copy your literal every move.

David Lynch’s influence is caked over I Know Who Killed Me so hard it might as well be the color blue (more on that later). We have characters who show up to set a general mood of “weird” or “uncomfortable” and then do very little else. Unexplained, no-context shots of moving objects or flashing lights. Boozy crowdscapes set to dreamy, toneless music. One of those creepy hairless cats with its balls on display for the world to see.

It’s all there. Not all of it is done badly, either. The scene in which Aubrey disappears in a throng of shrieking high school football fans (dressed in and painted blue – again, more on that later) who fade in and out of focus creates an appropriately disorienting, nightmarish effect. It is all, however, done purposelessly. Sivertson knows how to point a camera in a strange direction and linger there, but he rarely has a clear reason for doing so besides that he thinks it will look cool.

I am for this. I will forgive an awful lot of dumb stuff if it looks cool. Unfortunately, a great deal of it does not look cool. Some of it was never going to look cool, like the man Dakota encounters on a bus who advises her how to handle her severed finger, and who appears later in a dream sequence sporting a tattoo of a heart on his chest that looks upsettingly like a pulsating red scrotum. Some of it might have looked cool in more practiced hands, but in I Know Who Killed Me, it’s often, well, a little goofy.

Speaking of purposelessness, because this was the mid-to-late 2000s and federal law mandated that big-budget horror movies have torture sequences so that professional film critics could have something to moralize about, we get treated to some deeply unpleasant shots of Aubrey’s hands being mutilated. Like most torture sequences, these are not scary. Unlike more artistic and effective torture sequences, they also aren’t framed or edited in any compelling way. Indeed, the lingering close-ups on Aubrey’s bleeding fingers may be the least interesting shots in the entire film. They have a roteness to them, like Sivertson got a note from the producers asking if he couldn’t throw a little faux-Eli Roth in here with his faux-David Lynch.

Oh yes, and there’s the colors. I have to be deeply unoriginal for a moment, because, like every-goddamn-body else who watches I Know Who Killed Me, I noticed that the movie is a bit…shall we say…heavy-handed with its colors. Sivertson is on record that his favorite David Lynch film is Blue Velvet, and we can safely assume, having now seen his own work, that the part he really likes is the Blue. I Know Who Killed Me is extremely blue.

And when he’s not trying to drown us in a toilet full of blue food coloring, Sivertson pummels us just as hard with red.

You see, we are supposed to develop a strong association between Aubrey and the color blue, and another strong association between Dakota and the color red. A very strong association. An association we can never forget. There’s symbolism, and then there’s SYMBOLISM. Imagine if, instead of carefully placing oranges in scenes where someone was about to kick the bucket in The Godfather, Frances Ford Coppola had dressed soon-to-be victims in neon orange suits and digitally replaced their heads with oranges.

Done sparingly, this could have been effective; done with this level of wild abandon, it becomes a sick joke. A scene in which Dakota has loud, passionate, blue-and-red-smeared sex while Mrs. Fleming tries to cover up the sound by cleaning her sink (…?) is embarrassing for everyone involved. Geraghty doesn’t seem to know what he’s supposed to do, while Ormond does but can’t bring herself to do it.

The movie does, eventually, explain – and I do mean explain, not hint or allude to – why everything is blue and/or red.  The reason is even dumber than you think. It is so transcendently, enthusiastically stupid that it would be borderline criminal of me, if you have not yet had the pleasure of watching I Know Who Killed Me, to say more and not let you experience it for yourself. It’s like your first glimpse of the Grand Canyon, if the Grand Canyon were blue and red and full to the brim of subpar high school term papers.

Lohan, for her part, received two Worst Actress nominations for I Know Who Killed Me, one for each of her two characters, because Razzies gonna Razzie. I’m going to cut the Razzies some slack and say that one of these may have been warranted. Lohan’s turn as the goody-two-shoes Aubrey is perfectly fine; she’s essentially playing a more self-assured Cady Heron, and she has a proven track record of doing that well. Unfortunately, she spends much more of the film as Dakota, and it’s here that we run into problems.

Lohan has always been at her best as cute, chipper girls-next-door who get into something over their heads. As the world-weary Dakota, she never finds her footing, and Dakota’s lines sound unnatural coming out of her mouth. Part of this is because she is saddled with most of the worst bits of writer Jeff Hammond’s script here (“She was stupid. Pathetic. And a junkie.” and “You know, maybe that’s why ghosts are restless. There’s nothing left of what they were except the pain”), but more of it is that Lohan just doesn’t seem to like or be interested in this character. Her delivery is flat and murky, her movements (except when she’s pole dancing) uncertain. Trying to enter her Mature Phase with a character like Dakota Moss was a mistake because that role just doesn’t play to her strengths.

So yeah…there’s an awful lot here that doesn’t work.

THE GOOD

On the other hand, there’s quite a bit that does work, and it’s enough to make me sad that Chris Sivertson has pretty much no career to speak of anymore.

Seriously, look at this opening shot and try to tell me there’s no potential here.

This opening shot brought me excitement of a quasi-sexual nature. I would hang this opening shot on the wall of my house.  It’s just such an uncannily pretty image, tonally and compositionally satisfying, elegant and sleazy all at once, a ghostly and off-kilter feminine figure created by the reflection of a neon strip club sign in the water. If the movie had not then headed straight to January Teen Horror Movie Town with its plot and characters, I’d have been ready to declare Chris Sivertson one of my new favorite directors within the first ten minutes of the movie.

In fact, if you can make the conscious decision when you start I Know Who Killed Me to just ignore the stupid story, the quality of the viewing experience increases dramatically. It’s many things, but it’s never boring. Its construction might not always be artful, but it’s always eye-catching, like the movie equivalent of the Stata Center.

I mean, my goodness, we can say what we want about that suffocating color palette, but at least the movie has a color palette. It tries to create tone and atmosphere, and occasionally it even succeeds. The characters who show up just to make us think there’s something weird going on here do, in fact, make us think there’s something hella weird going on here.

The killer’s weirdly pretty set of pristine Killing Tools does contribute to an ethereal sort of dread, providing a nice counter to the mediocrity of the actual torture scenes. Given that it was up against the likes of Norbit, Bratz, and Daddy Day Camp in the Worst Picture category, these things are enough to make me willing to die to defend the film’s honor.

So, is I Know Who Killed Me a misunderstood classic, a victim of the cruel gods of fame and reputation? Yes and no. It’s not good. Its story is inane, its attempts at symbolism and imagery moreso. But damn if it does not commit very hard to its inanity, with all the charming obliviousness to its own glaring flaws that often accompanies that perfect marriage of sincerity and stupidity. And while it’s deeply unsubtle, its lack of subtlety is stylish and sometimes sexy, making for satisfying and unusual eye candy. I like this movie. I like the experience it provides.

In fact…is Sivertson ever going to release that director’s cut?

Quality of Movie: 2 / 5.  Nowhere near as awful as the Razzies would have us believe, but a lot of extremely bad decisions were made here.

Quality of Experience: 4 / 5.  Great dumb fun, and might even scratch a Hitchcock or Lynch itch if you’re not in the mood to think.

You can read Tim’s review of I Know Who Killed Me here!

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!