Bottom Feeders: It’s a (Parent) Trap! The horror movie remake of the remake.

It’s time for some more Bottom Feeders.  This week I review I Know Who Killed Me – a thriller that stars Lindsey Lohan as separated twins but somehow isn’t a sequel to The Parent Trap.  Before we dig in, it’s confession time: I love Guy Pearce.  To me, he is the perfect actor.  I love it when he plays good guys, I love it when he plays bad guys…sometimes I like to look at pictures of him for hours on end.  It’s not even sexual.  The man is just scientifically beautiful, the same way shooting stars are.

Unfortunately, Guy Pearce is not in I Know Who Killed Me.  Why am I talking about him then?  I dunno…I just…really like him.  Also any time I see bad acting, I wonder why they didn’t get Guy Pearce to play that role – and I saw a lot of it this time.  Obviously it’s a Lindsey Lohan movie so if you were expecting oscar-worthy performances you’re already a big dummy, but her role is just begging to be “Pearced,” as I like to say.  Yes, I know it’s a female character but if  you think Guy Pearce couldn’t pull it off you don’t know the man.  Also, don’t tell Guy Pearce what he can’t do.

Even so, I want to get it out of the way that there’s no point in blaming Lohan for her performance.  When Kevin Spacey acts poorly, you get angry because you’ve seen him be amazing and you know he’s phoning it in.  There was never a time when Lohan was considered a great actress.  She’s not letting us down, she’s just being herself.  Someone paid her good money to step in front of a camera and she accepted.  The role even seems like it would suit her.  Half the time she plays a sweet, innocent young girl with a bright future and the other half she’s a burned out whore with a potty mouth.

It seems like an ideal fit until you realize that on top of all that regular acting she’s going to have to do, you now want her to play two completely different characters, dance erotically, play piano and even do some narratin’.  That’s a pretty bad idea, seeing as she clearly has trouble just saying things into a camera…maybe even just speaking in general.  The whole movie is just scene after scene of the director trying desperately to find some way to make Lohan look even human.  They’re using her face with someone else’s body for almost everything. When they can’t do that they have to resort to more desperate measures.

Every time we see her as a stripper, it’s basically just her writhing on the floor with her legs in the air while stoner metal plays.  In the fight scenes they couldn’t show any one shot for more than .5 seconds or it would have become obvious that Lohan is barely capable of moving without falling down.  No matter what you try, there’s no camera trick in existence that can make it look like someone has a soul when they clearly don’t, so there are certain scenes that are just spectacular in how shitty they are.  For instance, while she’s getting tortured in one scene the camera flashes back and forth from her hand – whose digits are being chopped off – to her face, which is kind of screaming in pain or whatever.  There’s such a disconnect I thought the scene might be of Lohan watching somebody else’s hand get mutilated while someone gives her an Indian burn.

So obviously she wasn’t the best choice for the role, but that’s far from the only problem.  I Know Who Killed Me was made on a 12 million dollar budget – which is a lot in real people dollars, but not very much in Hollywood.  It shows.  It looks like it was edited on a laptop, and not even a Macbook at that.  Of course, you can explain the editing and some of the poor casting decisions on the shoestring budget but what you can’t explain is the script.  Just like everything else script writing is difficult and time consuming, but it technically doesn’t cost anything so you can do it as much as you want.  This is clearly a case where someone started at “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and got to “please give me my money now” way too soon and the result is a story that manages to be both boring and confusing.  The plot ambles along pretty aimlessly for a while as we watch some characters we don’t care about try and stop a killer we also don’t care about.  Then the movie goes through some routine plot twists – she thinks she’s someone else, turns out they’re twins…you know, the usual.  What does makes them unique is the utter lack of excitement with which they’re revealed.  Think less “and just when you thought you had it pegged…everything changes!” and more “oh, by the way they’re twins or something.”

Basically the movie just drags along for a while.  It’s got some bad acting and it’s pretty boring but it’s not the worst – yet.  Then things get good.  The movie climaxes as Lohan’s character finally confronts the mysterious serial killer.  Immediately, the music changes to wacky vaudevillian-style piano music and stays that way.  the movie gets at least ten times worse.  Lohan chops the bad guy’s hand off pretty quickly, they run around some more and then fight again with both of them missing a hand.  Oh, and this mysterious killer they’ve been trying to build up to?  In a move straight out of old school Scooby Doo, it turns out he’s…the piano teacher!  You know, the one they showed right at the beginning for like five minutes?  He’s teaching her and she quits her lessons?  Yay!  What amazes me is that he even wears a mask.  How could the movie not end with him tied up and Li-Lo revealing his face to the local police while explaining that he only did it to scare her away from his buried treasure?  That’s the real travesty here.  Also, the killer’s motive was literally that he wanted to punish his victims for not trying their hardest.  Unless there’s a serial killer somewhere out there that targeted people who didn’t live every day to the fullest, he’s officially the shittiest villain ever.

The Director, Chris Sivertson, actually directed a pretty decent movie based on a Jack Ketchum book called ‘The Lost” before this.  Seeing work so bad from him is kind of surprising.  Maybe he just wasn’t ready for a movie this high-profile or maybe the material he had to work with was just too shitty to overcome.  Who knows?  Ultimately this wasn’t a career killer for him so he can count himself lucky and move on.  The biggest failure of IKWKM was trying to cast a higher profile actress with no talent instead of a lesser known but fully functional human being.  It wouldn’t have made enough difference to actually make a good movie, but it would have been a whole lot more tolerable.  Basically they thought they’d stumbled onto a cheat code: make a movie for a pathetically small amount of money and cast someone recognizable in the lead role and enough people will see it for that reason alone to at least break even.  It’s nothing new in the horror genre, a section of the movie industry that has been great for people who love bad movies but terrible for people who like real movies for a long time.  There’s so little originality left it even puts the rest of Hollywood to shame.

You can make fun of the plans for a new Bill and Ted movie, but had that been a horror movie we’d be talking about them making the 17th instead of the third installment.  The inability of horror movies to bring in large crowds combined with the insane desire to try and make them do so means that risk-taking or ground breaking movies will always lose out in favor of another shitty Saw movie.  I Know Who Killed Me tried to be original in only the most twisted, perverted sense of the word.  It would have been way better if they had just made a Saw movie and that’s really saying something.  Regardless, the quest for the worst movie continues.  I Know Who Killed Me is terrible, but it’s just another in a long line of equally terrible horror movies that our kids will buy in packs of 50 one day at their Future Best Buys.

 

 

What you should watch instead: The Count of Monte Cristo.  God, I love Guy Pearce.

 

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