Tagged: Ric Meyers

Prurient: “Having or intended to arouse an unwholesome interest in sexual matters.”

– Encarta World English Dictionary

That’s pretty much the only word anyone needs to explain I Know Who Killed Me starring Lindsay Lohan. The words “great,” “well-made,” “engrossing,” or even “entertaining” wouldn’t suffice. “Fascinating,” however, might fit, given this car wreck of a film perfectly represented the star’s car wreck of a life at the time of its production.

The term “car wreck” is carefully and purposely chosen, however, since watching Lohan’s human accident is much like slowing down for highway rubbernecking – thanks to the “celebrity” obsessed media (who’s far more interested in such things than the public they maintain they serve seems to be).

Much in the way you can chart any actor’s state of mind by the projects they choose, this unfocussed, confused, schizo, meandering, self-absorbed-slash-self-loathing-slash-self-aggrandizing-slash-self-mutilating effort can reveal anything you ever wanted to know about Lohan’s self-sabotaging lifestyle. Her stumbles are all the more sad since, of the troika of self-immolating “celebs” the media is micro-analyzing (Britney and Paris make up the rest of the 3 Stooges), Lohan is clearly the most promising and/or talented.

That talent is only vaguely on display in this slasher psycho-drama, leaving only the body the actress and media seem to have a love/hate relationship with. Within the pretentious, muddled, fairly dull film, she plays a college student, who, after barely surviving an abduction, torture, and mutilation by a serial killer, wakes up to maintain that she’s a self-destructive stripper. This allows the film to lurch hither and yon between both girls’ lives as somebody searches for the sicko, and director Chris Sivertson tries to out DePalma Brian DePalma when it comes to pointless “are they or aren’t they?” fantasies, dream sequences, and flashbacks.

The film not only represents Lohan’s life, but it also reflects the quality of the DVD’s “special” features. The “Alternate Opening” and “Blooper Reel,” especially, are as misleading as the film. The former is simply an extended sequence with several more shots of lights reflected in water, which doesn’t change the opening’s meaning in any way (alternate means “different from,” not “slightly longer”). The latter are just a few joyless instances of actors inadvertently confusing a character’s name or not knowing their lines (blooper means that said mistake be “humorous” or even “mildly embarrassing”).

So that leaves the “Alternate Ending” and what any real fan came for: the “Extended Strip Dance Scene.” The former is less than a minute, but long enough to give the connotation that all that preceded it was a fiction from within the mind of the college student. The latter is exactly what it says: a longer version of Lohan’s PG-13 stripper act (complete with R-rated support strippers around her). No question: she’s an attractive young woman who can languidly sashay around on high heels, act pouty/dirty, and even (in the sequence’s “climax”) open her legs. Whoop-dee-do. (more…)