Say Something Nice: I KNOW WHO KILLED ME
There's plenty of unintentional comedy to mine in the 2007 Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me. If you haven't seen it and like things that are terrible, what you have here is a gold mine of bad creative decisions that culminate in one of the most baffling cinematic experiences of the 2000s. This movie drenches everything in royal blue hues to the point where you wonder if the film stock was soaked in Smurf blood, the plot is some bizarre nonsense about psychically-linked twins who are unaware of one another and suffer stigmata when the other receives injury – spoiler alert, I guess, but who really cares – and the whole production feels like an attempt to prove that Lohan ain't that sweet Disney girl anymore, yet the stripper sleaze she demonstrates wouldn't even cause your grandma to blink.
Oh, yeah, and there are casually introduced robot limbs. Because that's a totally normal thing that 100% replicated biological limb movement in 2007.
But there is one scene that is played for actual, unironic laughs, and it succeeds in prompting the appropriate emotional response, which should seem like the baseline measure of competence for any other movie, but here it's a monumental accomplishment.
The scene starts with Dakota (Lohan) being visited by her twin sister Aubrey's boyfriend Jerrod (Brian Geraghty), who like everyone assumes that Dakota is Aubrey suffering from some form of split-personality disorder. In order to convince Jerrod that she isn't Aubrey, Dakota decides to do something with Jerrod that the good girl Aubrey never would: have sex with him. To the shock of Aubrey's mother (Julia Ormond), Dakota takes Jerrod upstairs and starts to loudly fuck his brains out. Observe:
The film isn't content to just treat this as a sex scene. Instead, the film cuts back and forth to Aubrey's mom hearing everything downstairs in the kitchen, in perfect fidelity, as she tries to clean the sink in a futile effort to distract herself. It's genuinely funny to see this grinding and moaning juxtaposed to the pearl-clutching scandal of a mother thinking her daughter would so blatantly blow her off for a midday boinking. Of course, the comedy is only enhanced by how tame the actual sex is, though that doesn't detract from what was clearly meant to be the film's only real comic beat hitting home in the midst of a film so heightened by its absurdity that any sincere comedy should fall flat.
The film soon returns to its bizarre royal blue lighting and shots of a robot foot sitting in a wall charger, but for a brief moment I Know Who Killed Me feels like an intentional comedy. This is a film capable of being tongue in cheek for a brief moment before resuming an attitude of oblivious self-seriousness, and while you shouldn't respect it in those moments where the comedy is the product of ineptitude, it's worth pausing a moment to recognize that the one time when the film succeeds is when it's actually trying to be funny.
