So Bad It's Actually Bad

Last night I forwent going out on the town to stay in and watch a group of films with my friend and drink, as that was the cheaper option for the both of us. We made the trip to the video store and I picked out two and she picked out two, though we were both picking out four.

I got Hairspray and Hostel: Part II, and she got I Know Who Killed Me and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Not the best choices, but then again there wasn't much to choose from and we were slightly desperate.

The reason we even bothered to put I Know Who Killed Me in the bunch was because another friend-who'd actually gone to the theater to see it-recommended it to me as something that was absurd and so bad it was funny. Much to our horror, I Know Who Killed me wasn't so bad it was funny, it was simply so bad it was bad. Awful to be exact. A film that should have been at the bottom of a bucket from a cinematic abortion. It never should have happened.

By now making the requisite, "I know who killed Lindsay's career" would be overkill, but note that I tried. Despite the plethora of flaws this shitty films has, the one I kept harping on all throughout was the production value. Or lack thereof. The scenes were always lit very darkly, and there was this blue, theme they kept hammering away at us in every scene, as if we hadn't picked up on it the first 100 times we saw a BLUE rose, or a BLUE window, or some BLUE glass. The sets looked like... sets, as if there was no attempt to be made at making an actual film, and scenes were pasted together, some of which having nothing to do with anything else. And the plot is beyond ridiculous. I would give you a "spoiler alert" here, but trust me, me ruining this is for your own good.

Lindsay Lohan plays twins separated at birth and one ends up with a wealthy family, becoming a good teenage daughter, while the other ends up with their crackhead biological mother, becoming a stripper and a whore in the process. The Good Lindsay, named Aubrey, up and gets kidnapped one day, from a new serial killer in the neighborhood. How do we know it's a serial killer? Because there has been one other victim. That's right, ONE. And the reporters in the film come up with the whole serial killer tag even before Aubrey is kidnapped, so when she goes missing all the reporters wag their fingers at the nay saying cops like, "See! We told you so!" (note: that didn't really happen, but it kinda did).

One day some random woman driving past a ditch, almost crashes her car for no apparent reason other than to move the plot forward and discover "Aubrey" still alive, although she's missing some limbs. "Aubrey" is taken to the hospital where "her" parents are happy to see her alive, and no one really seems concerned that she's missing her right forearm and a good portion of her right leg. She's home is all that matters. That is, until the police come in and want her to answer some questions about where she's been and if she got a good look at her serial killer. "Aubrey" wonders why everyone keeps calling her Aubrey, seeing as her real name is Dakota.

Now, pay attention here kids, this is important. Earlier in the story the real Aubrey was reading from her short story in her creative writing class and what was the name of her title character? Dakota. Moving on...

A counselor is hired to see if "Aubrey" is lying but he comes to the conclusion that she's actually just "delusional" from the trauma she's had to endure. The cops don't buy it because Dakota, as they come to call her to be nice, has the exact same cuts as the first victim and if she wasn't with the serial killer then how'd she get the amputations? Limbs don't just fall off do they?

Apparently if you're an identical twin they can!

This is where the film just totally goes off into "We just don't give a fuckville" and asks the audience to believe in the existence of "twin stigmata" which is ordinarily just the case of one twin feeling another's pain, however IKWKM takes it to the extreme. Not only does Dakota feel her twin's pain, but when Aubrey gets a limb cut off, then Dakota's randomly falls off as well! And that's how Dakota's limbs fell off.

Now, how Dakota figures this out is amazing. She brings up AskJeeves (I guess the budget couldn't afford Google, or else Google had the good sense not to have their search engine be associated with this travesty)and looks up "stigmata" even though she's never actually experienced stigmata. She's losing limbs, not bleeding from her palms and feet. That leads her to check out one of those little extra interests that you get on the side, where she just happens to see "twin stigmata". She clicks on a picture and it immediately takes her to a cheap, Twilight Zone rip-off video on a "case" of twin stigmata. Now she's got it in her head that she has a twin out there, a twin that's losing limbs and she's got to find her!

Dakota takes this information to Aubrey's mother (and by the way, Dakota's also fucked Aubrey's boyfriend by this point as another means of "proving" she's not Aubrey, by way of asking the boyfriend, "Has Aubrey ever fucked you like that? No? Then I'm obviously not her.) Back to what I was saying. Aubrey goes to the mother, telling her she's got a twin, a twin that this mother who supposedly gave birth to her never knew about. I guess maybe Dakota thinks she might have snuck out of the vagina and made a run for it or something. The mother insists that's not true, showing Dakota the video of her ultra sound, which, sadly for Dakota, only has one fetus in the picture. As Dakota's hopes and dreams are dashed, Aubrey's father lurks around in the background, looking "mysterious" and creepy so that we know something's up.

Dakota goes to her room and I guess in order to keep the film from reaching the two hour mark, Dakota has a vision of Aubrey in a wedding dress by a river and puts the pieces together. You're probably thinking she realized where Aubrey was? Nope! Dakota goes to Aubrey's father and right out of the gate she tells him that she knows his wife's original baby died and that he went down the hall to where the crackhead had also given birth-to twins-and he bought one off her, switching the babies so the wife wouldn't be heartbroken her daughter died in childbirth. That's it. That's the conclusion she comes to without any prior knowledge or evidence. Naturally, because he'd been creepy lurking a scene earlier the dad cops to everything. I am stunned at this turn of events even though I shouldn't be. Nevermind how you'd get all the witnesses in the hospital to agree to such a thing, but the fact that she literally just pulled this out of her ass from a vision about a river caused my suspension of disbelief to pack it's bags and leave. I sat for the rest of the film with my arms crossed and very angry.

There's more, Dakota ends up figuring out "who killed me" (no, not you honey, we've already established you've got a twin) because she went to visit the grave of the first victim and found an award for a piano recital, given by the same guy who was Aubrey's piano teacher. That's right, it was apparently so simple that Dakota figured it out but not the FBI, who some how failed to make the connection of, "Your daughter studied under this piano teacher and she's now missing? Funny, the first victim studied under him as well and she went missing and ended up dead. Wow. That's odd."

No, no. It took a boozed up stripper to do the job of our government. The ending is, in a nutshell, the father and Dakota go to the piano teachers house (without telling anyone where they were going, of course)and dad ends up dead while Dakota saves the day, finding the spot by the river where Aubrey had been buried alive. Instead of calling the cops to come and get her sister much needed medical attention Dakota decides it's best if they just lay on the ground for a moment, as the camera pulls back.

It was a shitty film is what I'm getting at.

The other three weren't much better, Hostel II somehow managed to be more boring than the first one and I cared even less for these victims than I did for the guys. Everyone of their decisions was the absolute stupidest decision a character could make, so I didn't feel sorry for them when they ended up getting their stupid asses killed. The ending was supposed to be a controversial "twist", but it was really just a cop out.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was supposed to be one of those films where the main characters become better people for pretending to be an oppressed group of people and walking a mile in those shoes, but it really just came off as offensive. There weren't any real gay characters, just stereotypes and I really have a hard time believing Adam Sandler as a regular joe firefighter could possibly attract as many women as his character was supposed to. If it were actually Adam Sandler with all his money, no problem, but just a regular guy? Not a chance. The entire set up to the premise didn't hold water either. I'm supposed to believe that Kevin James' character was so distraught after his wife's death it didn't occur to him after a whole year, or that no one reminded him, that he needed to transfer his wife's pension? He's a father, with his wife dead he could take the time to mourn but sheesh, for a YEAR? He didn't realize that when he was going through his wife's affairs? He's either stupid or negligent.

And finally, I fell asleep during Hairspray, I'm sorry to say. It was the last film after six hours of drinking and watching other crappy films and I just couldn't make it through. What I did see wasn't all that great and it just made me want to watch the original Hairspray.