"um.." To Rhyme with "Dear, God, Please.. No More"

[msmoon]

Wow...s'been a while since I've done a movie review (srsly, it was like september of last year last time or something). And... I need to vent about this movie I just watched...so here we go.

Rating 2 out of 5

Movie Info
Written By: Jeff Hammond
Directed by: Chris Sivertson
Release Dates: Theatrical: July 27, 2007 | DVD: November 27, 2007
RATING: R for grisly violence including torture and disturbing gory images, and for sexuality, nudity and language
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty, Garcelle Beauvais, Spencer Garrett, Gregory Itzin, and Bonnie Aarons.
Summary: An idyllic small town is rocked when Aubrey Fleming, a bright and promising young college student is abducted and tortured by a sadistic serial killer. When she manages to escape, the traumatized young woman who regains consciousness in the hospital insists that she is not who they think she is and the real Aubrey is still in mortal danger. (Sony Pictures)

 

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.... /sigh. You know... I encourage original thought. If you have a different opinion than me, that's fine. In fact, it's better than fine. It's great. It means you're thinking for yourself and not trying to be a copy cat. And that is why I generally like to throw caution to the wind and partake in something that most people shun for the simple purpose that critics look down on it. That's why I bought I Know Who Killed Me...and that's why I wasted two and a half hours of my life on it...No, this movie isn't two and a half hours long. But, I watched it the first time and was so confused... I decided to mull it over and then watch it again. After all, I do have ADD, and it was staring Lindsay Lohan, so perhaps I just wasn't paying attention. After I watched it a second time.... I was astonished.

Not astonished in the 'This Awesomeness Knows No Bounds' sense such as with Lord of the Rings... no, the astonished I'm referring to is more of a 'wtf! was that shit!?' astounded. I immediately went online and looked up reviews on it.... this, Ladies and Jellyspoons, is one of those times where you just take what the general consensus is saying and go with it. Even the bloopers sucked... srsly. There were bloopers and they just ... were terrible. They weren't funny, so it was just a bunch of shots of people messing up and laughing at themselves... I'm so spoiled to Jared and Jensen bloopers.

... the sad part of it is... the idea behind this movie ... doesn't suck. In fact, it's somewhat good. It's just stifled by poor execution, sucky portrayals and disgusting displays of gore and sex.

Things start out well enough (I suppose >..>). We see Ms. Lohan as a stripper, although not a very energetic one, and as she takes a twirl on the pole, her hand starts to bleed terribly. Then we focus on ... Ms. Lohan... in an amazing house, as Aubrey Fleming the student/writer/pianist.... She quits piano so that she can focus on her writing and school and such. We see her at school, and at home, and it's obvious she's an upstanding girl as she uses thick glasses when she's writing with froms post-its to form plot lines... not to mention, at school though she obviously likes/lusts her boyfriend Jerrod Pointer (Brian Geraghty), she refuses to have sex with him as it's impractical (they'll be graduating and leaving for college soon) and she isn't sure if she really loves him.

Insert gut-wrenching plot point, a local girl and student, Jennifer Toland (Stacy Lynn Gabel), is found dead with grotesque amputations of her hand and leg. The press are cheering serial killer, but it's only the first body they find so... that kinda gives away the direction the plot shall soon take, no? There's the torturous display of us having to watch her mother dissolve into sorrow as she identifies her daughters mutilated body. The poor girl is given a moment of silence at the school's football game, but other than that she gets nothing.

But the football game is on! Though it's not very well focused on.... the after-the-game is more interesting as Aubrey scampers off to find her boyfriend, separating from her friends in the crowd and... disappearing. Cut to the place they were supposed to meet up, the movie theater, and neither her friends or her boyfriend know where she is and she isn't answering her cell and her car is right where she left it.... So, since her family's rich, of course she's immediately declared missing. There are searches, Aubrey's computer's hard drive is copied, everyone is questioned and all seems very bleak...

The scene at the beginning of the show with the stripper in the shadows mysteriously bleeding as she hangs from a pole is nearly forgotten.... until someone sees a lump of mangled human on the side of the road. Of course! It's Aubrey!....but when she wakes up, she has no idea who 'Aubrey' is. She...is Dakota. Dakota Moss. Now we're all lead to wonder, 'Was that an allusion to something metaphorical?' But Dakota is convincing! ...Or at least to the FBI's psychologist she is. He thinks that Aubrey is delusional, that she's created an alter ego ...because Dakota is so different and her stories are too consistent.

Personally? The only difference between Aubrey and Dakota is that Dakota smokes and drops the F-bomb like mad. Also, she's more willing to sleep with Aubrey's hunky jock boyfriend and prefers red to Aubrey's blue. Seriously, Aubrey is Blue and Dakota is red. That's really the only difference between the two. Aubrey has straight, sleek hair and Dakota prefers bouncy, wavy hair. Sure, Dakota is an exotic dancer, but Aubrey was a tease to. We shouldn't begrudge Dakota just because she actually got paid for doing repulsive things to poles and customer's cigarets.

Aubrey's mom and dad are more than happy to have her back and usually don't seem to mind her insisting that she's another person.... even if Mom (Julia Ormond) does nearly have a nervous meltdown when Dakota trots Jerrod upstairs to have noisy sex. Dad (Neal McDonough who I adored in Tin Man) seems awfully reluctant to embrace his new daughter. He's happy enough that she's back in the house and wants to keep her there, but he rarely reaches out to her like Mom does. Jerrod is just happy to be getting some from an enthusiastic (and skilled) partner.

Dakota maintains that she isn't Aubrey... even though Aubrey's password is 'dakota', and her blood is an exact match to Aubrey. She says that she is the daughter of a crackhead mom who died, and the only option for work open to her was to become an exotic dancer... she also says that mysterious injuries just started happening to her. Meanwhile, the FBI find a story that Aubrey was writing about the daughter of Mrs. Moss.... so they believe Dakota to be a character that Aubrey is wrapping herself in due to the trauma she endured.

After Dakota does a bit of research on Aubrey's computer, she discoveries something called 'stigmata twins'. She then believes that she is in fact, Aubrey's identical twin... but Aubrey's mom shows her an ultrasound with a single baby. They have a touching moment in which dad looms unnoticed in the background. Dakota soon approaches dear old dad about her suspicions... their baby really did die, so he bought a baby from a crackhead who had one to spare. She says she saw envelopes with money post marked from the town they live in, so she knows it's true. He tries to dissuade her, but turns his view around after a good cussing out and storming off on Dakota's part.

Dakota knows that Aubrey is still alive and that when Aubrey dies, she'll die. So it's in her best interest to find her stigmata twin. In short, dear old Dad joins up with her in the end, only to be killed by his daughter's attacker. Aubrey has been buried in a blue glass coffin (after the dude had cut on her with several blue instruments) and it turns out to be.... her x-piano teacher O..O (there was a moment in which I thought, 'yeah it's probably him' but dismissed it as too corny). Evidently he cut off her arm and leg because she wasn't using them as her instruments to achieve her talent any more...

Ok, so Aubrey is buried somewhere, and Dad is dead.... Dakota struggles with the killer, offing him easily enough with one of his own blue weapons. Then she uses her 'sixth sense' to find her twin, digging her up and punching though the glass coffin with her prosthetic/robotic hand. The last scene of the movie is of Aubrey lying on the ground peacefully with Dakota snuggled up next to her.... end credits roll.

OK, so.... the idea is pretty cool when you think about it. You think this is another Secret Window with a writer having a character posses them or something then turning out to be a....a Stigmata Twin? That's pretty cool... the execution and plot surrounding it, not to mention just the performance of the main actress.... that's what brought it down. I'm not a Lindsey Lohan fan, right? But I'm not a Kristin Stewart fan. I can still stand to see Kristin Stewart as Bella (she's not the best, but we knew the movies would never be as good as the books anyway). So... this really isn't my hate campaign against Lindsey Lohan... she just sucked in this. Plus there was just too much needless gore... and the sex scene was very hastily skipped over -..- It didn't help that the plot surrounding the main idea was built up so poorly though. I mean, through the whole thing I keep asking myself two questions: 'why?' and 'what!'.... and at some point, you think it can't get worse, and then the ending. sucked. ass! I mean... we don't know if they survived (though I assume they did as the only thing killing Aubrey would be suffocation at this point), we don't know if they got back to mom, we don't know anything! Way to leave us without any closure there!

 

Over all, the general idea behind this movie was worth the tell of a story.... unfortunately everything else sucked so badly, that I didn't even care any more. I suppose now I know why it was $3 at Big Lots -..-'