I Know Who Killed Me

Writer: Jeff Hammond
Director: Chris Sivertson
Rating: R
Run Time: 105 minutes
The Reel Man: 0 reels

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After recent run-ins with the law, including a car chase through Santa Monica, queen of the supermarket tabloid, Lindsay Lohan, has become so ubiquitous that every morning I half expect to pour her out of my box of cereal. The likely result of this scenario would be Lohan clinging to a Cheerio life preserver, and no matter how many times I tried to submerge her with my spoon, she would resurface somewhere else in the bowl.

The irony of Lohan's arrest is that it may have actually saved her career for it prevented the freckled starlet from promoting what is arguably her worst cinematic outing to date, I Know Who Killed Me. The movie theatre I saw it in was empty. Although to be fair, it was the 10:45AM, Sunday matinee, as well as the Open Captioned version for the hearing impaired - because everyone knows that deaf people are notoriously early risers.

Lindsay Lohan plays Aubrey Fleming, a good-natured, high school senior and aspiring writer. The central character of her short stories is Dakota, a teenager who escapes the horrors of her life by retreating to the shelter of her imagination. The town is shaken by the recent disappearance of Jennifer Toland, a classmate of Aubrey’s, whose body is soon discovered with her right leg and arm amputated. It isn’t long before Aubrey is abducted and found near death, with similar injuries. An FBI agent investigating the case explains that the dismemberment of the victims is about punishment. Ah, our first clue as to who the killer is.

Aubrey doesn’t recognize her parents and, in fact, claims she is not Aubrey at all, but rather Dakota Moss, a down-on-her-luck exotic dancer from a seedy gentleman's club. Is she telling the truth about her identity? Or is Dakota really just Aubrey’s alter ego, a kind of psychological safe haven? After the fastest amputee rehabilitation program in screen history, complete with bionic prosthetic, Aubrey-- er, Dakota, goes in search for answers.

In his first produced screenplay, writer Jeff Hammond phones in a plot that is as uncooked as the yellowtail sashimi at Nobu. It seems as though he worked backwards, using the title of the film as a starting point. He might have done well to read Aubrey’s tackboard with notes on Three Act structure. The FBI agents come off more two-dimensional than the paper their dialogue is printed on, which is no surprise since their purpose in the story never rises above the occasional mislead or piece of exposition. Inept to a fault, they fail to ask the most obvious question: What do Aubrey and Jennifer (the first victim) have in common? And that sound you hear is Sherlock Holmes vomiting into his overpriced bag of popcorn.

The list of suspects is long, a writing tactic intent on hiding the “ball." Is the killer the hunky landscaper, the helpful bus passenger, the disappointed piano instructor, the creepy father or the eunuch boyfriend? Unfortunately, the writing is not the only flaw in this alleged summer thriller.

Bruce Dickenson is to cowbell as director Chris Sivertson is to blue. It’s a color motif that is beaten over our heads. There’s the blue rose, the blue competition ribbon, the blue hospital gloves, the blue cat collar, the blue football jerseys and the blue condom (Dakota may be the daughter of a crackwhore, but she still practices safe sex.) Sivertson employed so much blue, in fact, that American films currently in production are scrambling to import the color from overseas. But blue is not the only important color in the film; red is just as significant although less obvious. Both colors play as stand-ins for the film's central Yin-Yang theme. Blue is Aubrey; red is Dakota. It's a somewhat interesting device made a little less so by its abundant use the past three seasons on ABC's Lost.

I confess that when Aubrey tells her friends about a killer on the loose who stabs theatergoers in the back of the neck, I did a whiparound to check if anyone was behind me. However, that speaks more to my paranoia and cat-like reflexes than it does to any success of the film.

But despite this diatribe, the film is not without its positives, most notably Production Assistant Lindsey Isaacson, who I’ve been told never let the office phone ring more than once before answering. In fact, often she would pick up before it rang. The catering is also reported to have been quite good, although a handful of the crew complained about a lack of cream cheese at the bagel table.All kidding aside, for me personally, the best thing about I Know Who Killed Me is the opening song, "Step On Inside" by Vietnam. Singer Michael William does little to hide his influences, especially that of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. It is a track destined to make my Best of 2007 CD. Holler if you want one.