With all apologies to Dane Cook and everyone else behind Good Luck Chuck, there’s a new candidate for Worst Movie of 2007 rising like a phoenix from the crappy ashes. Lindsay Lohan is culpable in I Know Who Killed Me, a steaming turd of a movie that earns every bit of awful it manages to drum up. With pretentious direction, awful acting, a convoluted and idiotic plot, and a twist that makes no sense at all and generates belly laughs from even the most ignorant critics of film, I Know Who Killed Me may well be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

I’ll start by attempting to explain the plot without spoiling anything, as there are some gluttons for punishment out there that may actually want to experience this tripe for themselves. Everything takes place in the quiet suburb of New Salem. Lohan stars as Aubrey, a talented pianist (or so they want us to think after a few seconds of tinkling away on the piano) and a talented writer (yeah, right). All of a sudden Aubrey goes missing and police and the feds start to think she’s the latest victim of a serial killer sort of character.

One night a driver discovers a girl by the side of the road and it turns out to be Aubrey, or so everyone thinks. Aubrey’s distraught parents (Julia Ormond and Neal McDonough) show up at the hospital and try to talk to her, but she winds up telling them her name is Dakota and that they aren’t her parents. Lots of confusion ensues as everyone tries to discover who Dakota is and whether or not she’s telling the truth. Some think she has some sort of memory issues and colour-coded flashbacks serve to tell the story through varying perspectives in an idiotic, pretentious fashion.

Watching this bullshit, it’s no small wonder that Richard Roeper had plopped this wet fart out as his worst movie of 2007 and I am now inclined to do the same. Bear in mind, just to add to the madness of this, that I also watched Norbit over the same period of time and I Know Who Killed Me still rated as worse. Much, much worse. The film also packed in more Razzie nominations than any other movie and currently holds a whopping 8% over at Rotten Tomatoes.

So what is it about I Know Who Killed Me that makes it so damn bad? I’ll start at the bottom and work my way up. The plot is incredibly drawn-out and has all of the intelligence and surprise of a wet bag filled with hair. The real identity of the killer is not only unexceptional in every way, it’s actually worth throwing a soda or perhaps a sack of popcorn at the screen. When the identity of the killer is revealed, it’s shock-inducing in how stupid and pallid the makers of this movie are. The complete lack of rationality is made up for only by its tastelessness.

Then there’s the idiotic colour-coding. Dakota is red and Aubrey is blue, get it? So things that are blue, really blue, represent Aubrey. The beer-soaked lights at the strip club where Dakota works are red, as is everything that surrounds the strange young woman. This helps keep things simple for audiences too stupid to grasp Chris Sivertson’s boneheaded directorial clues and it also distracts from just about everything. The screen actually saturates in blue and/or red at certain moments just to indicate how arty Sivertson can be.

Lohan is terrible, which adds to the madness considerably. She’s playing a high school student in Aubrey and a stripper in Dakota, which is a compelling dichotomy brought to us through the use of the primary colours. Working kind of like a bad sequel to The Parent Trap, Lohan’s pair of roles soon turns ugly and it’s almost as if she forgets who she’s playing in some scenes. It doesn’t help the realism factor that her high-school boyfriend is played by a 33-year-old. Ugh.

The problems mount on top like Lohan mounts on top of Brian Geraghty and the stupidity of this movie is just hard to contain. In the end, it’s much better to avoid I Know Who Killed Me than to subject your brain to it. But if it must be done, pay careful attention to the colour-coding or all will be lost. I am, however, tempted to give this film one point for Lindsay Lohan’s stripping scenes, as the realism of her writhing around ass-first against a shiny pole is certainly appealing.

0 or 1/10

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