I Know Who Killed Me

Not terrible, although you could see why so many critics and audiences mistook it for being so bad (it “won” the Razzie for Worst Picture of the Year). Because it stars Lindsay Lohan within close proximity to the entrance or exit of rehab, viewers went in with very low expectations and regarded anything out-of-the-ordinary or unconventional as being simply “wrong.” At one point, a girl at a junior college reads from her latest short story, and the story is kind of lame and wordy and pretentious. A viewer with the wrong mindset will assume that the scriptwriter is trying his best and failed. A viewer with a forgiving mindset might assume, hey, a spoiled junior college girl really would write something lame, wordy, and pretentious. No benefit of the doubt for poor “I Know Who Killed Me.”

"I Know Who Killed Me" is wannabe De Palma or wannabe Lynch -- and there are worse things to which to aspire than those two -- crossed with the feel of one of those live-action Disney horror films of the early ‘80s. Even as “I Know Who Killed Me” sometimes flounders, or drags, or makes you think, “yeah, I can see where De Palma or Lynch would have done better,” I can’t help but admire the ambition to be a wannabe De Palma.

“Killed Me” follows two girls (Lohan both, not great but certainly not terrible) who might be psychically-linked twin sisters separated at birth, or they might be one girl with trauma-induced schizophrenia. Sounds like “Sisters” and “Vertigo” and “Mulholland Drive” a little, doesn’t it? And the movie features Julia Ormond, who was IN Lynch’s most recent film, “INLAND EMPIRE.” Anyway, the first girl is a spoiled rich goody two-shoes; the second is a potty-mouth stripper from skidrow. We follow both their lives in a twisty chronology. The trauma is being kidnapped by a maniac who’s been cutting one arm and one leg off his victims before burying them alive (yikes!).

The ending of “Killed Me” seems definitive in whether or not there are two girls or one, but even it seems so preposterous that you could just as easily interpret the ending as being an hallucination or a daydream being had by the other possibility. If the girls really are twins, then we have to buy psychic links and so forth. If there’s only one girl and she’s schizophrenic, or imagining the whole thing, then what we’re seeing is Miss Good Two-Shoes finally engaging in all the reckless behavior she’s been repressing.

The first part is the best, with really disjointed editing (I couldn’t resist the pun), as characters appear without introduction in a way that seems both methodical and random. About halfway through, the detectives introduce themselves formally and “Killed Me” settles slightly into a more conventional feel. Perhaps the shortcoming of director Chris Sivertson is in not being MORE preposterous. He beats us over the head with red imagery for the bad girl and blue imagery for the good one. “I Know Who Killed Me” comes up feeling like De Palma Junior and, even though it’s probably ruined the careers of its writer and director, I hope they get another chance in the future. I’d rather see this movie again than “Juno.”

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