Weekly Review -- (A bad example of ) Shifting identities

I Know Who Killed Me (2007) -- There is not much to say about this crash-and-burn movie. I suspect that, even if its release had not been overshadowed by Lindsay Lohan's tabloid antics, the nonsensical screenplay and seemingly improvised twists would have rendered it DOA anyway. Popular and successful high school student Aubrey Fleming (Lohan) disappears, with everyone presuming that she ended up being the latest victim of a sadistic serial killer who has already claimed several young lives. However, Aubrey is found, but insists that she is in fact a stripper named Dakota Moss. She now has to unravel the mystery, with the killer possibly being on her tail, and the police disbelieving her assertions, and on the story goes, right up until some incredibly concocted revelations. Surprisingly, Lohan is not half bad, although some of her deliveries sound forced, but she has time to learn. Had more time been invested into the screenplay, the real saving grace of the movie would have been Julia Ormond, who plays Aubrey's mother and whose emotional rollercoasters are subtle and moving. The screenplay is chock-full of clichéd lines and anti-climactic twists. There are some truly gory torture scenes, with blood and amputations galore; I imagine that the Hostel flicks share quite a resemblance. It appears, long and elaborate as the sequences are, that more time was invested into these sick little details than the story itself. Another not-so-random thing about the movie is that it lifts so many thematic and stylistic elements from David Lynch's "Twin Peaks", that I stopped counting after a while. Why is it that filmmakers always decide to rip off a work of quality when their own endeavor is leading them nowhere fast? Come to think of it, the one good thing that may possibly come out of this mess -- fingers crossed -- is that younger viewers run into forum discussions that mention "Twin Peaks" and decide to seek out the series and the subsequent film, while forgetting about this vehicle altogether. If they did, they would be rewarded with a superbly written, unique work of art... something that this movie can only lag behind on its amputated ideas.

3/10