The Collector (2009)

Some people like to collect stamps, other people like to collect seashells. Some people have collections that others might find completely insane or bizarre. Some people like to collect brain cells – clearly those who made The Collector were not among them, as this is a seriously insipid, valueless piece of celluloid trying to be a movie.

Director: Marcus Dunstan

Starrimg: Josh Stewart, Juan Fernandez

IMDb

(Co-written with Michelle and Kevin.)

If all you want is gore, gore and more gore, this will satisfy you. They succeeded at that goal. However I tend to think making a movie just to show off a bunch of torture crap is about as laudable an accomplishment as “Hey! I bashed my own face in with a hammer MORE TIMES THAN ANYBODY!” I heard about this movie back when it came out in 2009, but nobody ever talked about it all that much. I wondered why that was, especially for a movie that generated a sequel a few years after, up until I actually saw it. Then I perfectly understood why nobody ever talked about this movie.

We start off this movie with a couple finding a magic box in their bedroom. It sort of looks like one of the boxes a magician might use to "cut a girl in half." Since it's a suspicious object which shouldn't be there and obviously signifies that someone broke into their home, they call the police and ... HA HA HA, of course not. The idiot husband just goes up and, like a true idiot, opens the damn box, which is just a distraction for the movie's killer to grab them.

And it's allllllll downhill from this, guys!

After a credit sequence more befitting of a crappy CSI: Miami ripoff TV show, we get main character Arkin doing what he does best on the job: hanging out with little girls in their rooms and having tea. You know, the BEST parts of being a pest exterminator! The father comes in and is suitably indignant about it, as he only wants the plumber and the electrician to hang out with his daughter, NOT the pest exterminator.

Yeah this kind of credit scene was totally rad and cool ... when I saw it in Se7en 20 years ago.

The purposefully shitty picture quality combined with the awful audio doesn't make this retro, just ultralame.

It seems Arkin just can’t win though, as he goes outside and immediately gets the older teenage version of having a tea party: the other daughter of the family comes up and demands to take a drag from his cigarette. She’s the kind of person who flirts by asking what Arkin’s name means – truly a tantalizing and flirtatious question, I know. Then again, I guess ANYTHING sounds tantalizing when you mutter it in a voice so low the audience can’t hear a fucking word you’re saying. Yeah, this is one of THOSE movies … you know, the ones where the movie tries to disguise its own banality by making every line of dialogue a half-whisper like the characters are about to fall asleep.

Smoking is cool! Too bad the cancer spreading in our lungs right now will make it impossible for either of our characters to say a single line that isn't impossible to understand with the movie's bad audio quality!

So the daughter then goes upstairs and fakes an argument with her mom about going on some family vacation. Uh, OK? Why are we seeing this again? Maybe to confirm that the daughter is a bad actress, played by an already bad actress – it’s sort of like acting inception! Bad acting inside bad acting inside a bad movie.

So if you’re wondering if this movie has ANY real direction or coherence at all, the movie FINALLY gets off its ass and does something. Arkin goes to meet his girlfriend or ex-wife or mother of his daughter or whatever they are – it never really explains their relationship. He brings his daughter a stuffed bear, which causes his ex to get MAD because he should’ve been using that money to help pay off the loan sharks who will otherwise kill her.

I'm just blown away by how many shots there are in this fucking movie of Arkin up close in peoples' faces like that, holding the sides of their head. He does it like all the time! Weird thing to complain about, yeah, but even so - it's weird how many of these shots they tried to cram in. Also, you can't see it in my stills, but good luck not being nauseated by the jangling, unfocused mess that tries to pass for "camerawork" in this movie. Bunch of trendy shaky-cam crap, is what this is.

Yup, you know how it goes! The old “ex-wife owes money to the mob” love story. We’ve seen this a thousand times over in … uh … well, actually no, it’s just bizarre that THIS is what passes for drama in this movie. You seriously couldn’t think of anything else that could possibly drive the film’s conflict forward? It HAD to be “the mafia is coming to get me”? Maybe in a totally different movie, but in one of these torture-gore-porn flicks it just comes off as ridiculously extraneous and unnecessary - especially since they don't ever focus on it again, outside of a hollow reason to get Arkin into the torture-house pretty soon.

I just love the implications of this, too; the ex-wife is clearly afraid of someone coming to kill her, so of course she brings her young daughter out in public where anyone could easily try to kill them! Genius!

The scene is droll and boring: the ex-wife just bitches at Arkin a lot and there’s really nothing of substance to latch onto. Arkin then goes to a sleazy nightclub where I guess it’s “I Know Who Killed Me” day at work:

Aside from the sad fact that I Know Who Killed Me (second pic) is actually better than another movie - even just in terms of production quality - can you even tell the difference between these two? Would you even guess they weren't from the same movie?

I guess Arkin is just there to see Laurence Fishburne’s drunk deadbeat brother, who is some kind of crime boss or something – I don’t really know, and he never appears in the movie again, so either way. What follows is an overly long scene where Fishburne-lite and his cronies burn the hairs off of Arkin’s hand and eventually just tell him they won’t help him and he’s on his own about the money. Why did we have this scene at all? To pad out the running time, of course!

So that's what happened to Marcellus Wallace after Pulp Fiction.

The following scene, where he breaks into the house from earlier, is also incredibly boring and pointless. Yes, we have to have a scene painstakingly showing him breaking in to bridge where the movie is going – but does it HAVE to be so incredibly bland? The only thing going on here is what a fucking piece of shit ingrate Arkin really is. Yeah, buddy, you break into the house of those people who trusted you to work for them! You’re a real upstanding guy!

It’s just amazing that we’re actually expected to root for this thieving piece of garbage, good intentions notwithstanding. Maybe it’d be one thing if he was a better written character in whom we could see the complexity and depth of his conflict, but in THIS movie? That’s a laugh – the only thing any of what’s going on before this point was good for was just padding before the movie turns into a torture fuck-fest of epic proportions. As an aside, he’s there to steal some kind of rare jewel, which this family conveniently has in a safe hidden behind a painting. Because I guess most suburban families just happen to have rare jewels they can hide in safes in their own homes.

I have to admit a couple of the atmospheric shots of the house are sorta nice, building up some tension. However, it’s all pretty much ruined as soon as Arkin opens his fucking eyes and suddenly realizes that the entire house has been booby-trapped the whole time and SOMEHOW he just missed it when he was coming in! This guy is the worst thief ever. How could he miss all these wires and traps set up? They’re literally all over the place!

"Guess I must have missed these obvious wires all over the place when I came in! When they taught about situational awareness in thieving school, I was passed out drunk by a dumpster outside of a Burger King. Whoops!"

Some of these traps are just ridiculous, and way too contrived and implausible to really be effective at captivating the audience’s imagination. He tries to call 9-1-1 but…

Ha HA! He didn't count on me wearing protective earmuffs to make a phone call in his sick torture dungeon house fantasy land! I have outsmarted the great Collector killer!

Yup, a spike in the phone – I guess the killer was COUNTING on whoever came inside the house jamming the phone to their ear hard enough to drive that spike in. Because you know, that’s how you use a phone!

So Arkin, bewildered that he’s appearing in the Jigsaw Killer’s interpretation of the Home Alone franchise, finds his way down to the basement, where the family is being tortured in horribly green-lit dungeons with so much grain on the camera filter that it’s like the movie spent too long sunbathing at the beach without a towel to lay on.

"Allow me to keep placating and comforting you without actually trying to save you or do anything useful ever, like I do with every other character in the film." Seriously, yet another worthless cliche straight from the asses of the writers. When will these movies learn that the whole "leave kidnapped victims where they are so as not to distract the killer" thing NEVER works?

These scenes are just amazing in how stupid they are, mostly because of one fact: Arkin now knows the killer is in the house and has found the victims left alone. Instead of just waiting for the killer to come back and surprising him or knocking him out or something, Arkin decides the best course of action is to tell the blindfolded, tied-up wife to scream and distract the killer while he goes upstairs to fuck around some more. The movie could be over in five minutes if Arkin just waited down there and beat the killer over the head from behind! But that can’t happen yet. We haven’t had the SUPER SCARY threatening tongue-cut-off scene with the wife:

Yeah because for one, a tied up, blindfolded woman in a bathtub being tortured is real fucking good cinema, right? Fuck you. Two, they don’t even take advantage of this while they have it on screen! As despicable as it would be to mutilate this woman’s tongue, AT THE VERY LEAST it would fit with the movie’s modus operandi of showing gore! But the killer doesn’t actually do anything to her, and she’s fine the next time we see her. This movie's failure is so all-encompassing, so universal, that it can’t even accomplish the ONE MINISCULE, SMALL-MINDED GOAL IT SET OUT TO DO.

Upstairs, Arkin finds a bloody guy in the closet inside that box – the same guy who discovered the magic box from the opening. This guy is really only here to spew exposition like a leaky sewer pipe: the guy in the house is called the Collector, and he “collects” people and kills everyone else. That’s it – that’s really all the story you’re going to get with this. Just the image of the killer putting that guy in the box and hauling it to this house on the off-chance someone would actually find and open it in the fucking closet is astounding to me. How did this guy even survive that long trapped in that tiny-ass box? Did the killer just put a mini-fridge and A.C. in there for him? I guess it wouldn’t surprise me, given how implausible and insane the rest of this is.

Like, really, was putting hot yellow mustard-colored acid on the floor of a whole room a great idea? All it amounts to in the end is a cat getting caught in it. Arkin does the sensible thing and rips the cat out and hurls it toward the window – you’re not playing football, you inbred moron. What, you couldn’t have tried to save it? You had to throw it like that? The cat lands on the windowsill, which the killer anticipated: he outfitted the windowsill with a motion-sensing guillotine that clamps down and cuts the cat in half.

Huh. That’s two movies in the last three weeks I’ve seen where cats are killed. I don’t know how to feel about that!

We then see another trademark of the film – the killer just can’t seem to find Arkin. Part of me thought this was because he knew Arkin was there and was just playing with him. No, though – he can’t even see him right there:

"If I stay here long enough, maybe he'll get bored and go home!"

Don’t play Hide n’ Seek with this guy; you’ll stump him so bad he won’t EVER find you. Speaking of which, what’s with the killer’s outfit anyway? Was it made solely from the ass-cheeks of leather pants made for fat people? Personally I was more intimidated by the GIMP mask guy from Pulp Fiction.

Two Pulp Fiction references in the same review. Damn I'm good.

We then see the film’s ultimate height of stupidity as the older daughter comes back with her boyfriend and finds the house locked. The killer, somehow sensing them, opens the door for them and then hides. They come in and have maybe the worst sex scene I’ve ever seen, just for one fact – HOW DO THEY NOT SEE ALL THE TRAPS SET UP AROUND THE LIVING ROOM?! Even if you’re gonna tell me they’re just so into each other, even then – it still wouldn’t make sense. The traps are ALL RIGHT THERE. CLEARLY VISIBLE. OUT IN THE OPEN. These characters should see them, freak out, run outside the way they came and RUN. But nope, we need nudity in the movie, so we get some right before their unceremonious deaths:

And he's just sitting there watching them; what a fucking loser this killer is. "Hmm, well I was gonna torture and kill everyone, but I think I'll take a break to watch two people have sex." Pfft.

I gotta admit, the death scene by way of a bunch of bear traps is almost worth it. Almost. Not really though.

Arkin, finally having had enough, actually escapes and gets out of the house through an upstairs window. He could easily run to the cops and get help, but instead he sees the little girl of the family through a window and has to go save her:

No, the right answer is STILL go find law enforcement and get help. Not go back in the torture house it took you like an hour to escape from already!

Why are you so worried? Oh, I guess it’s because The Collector knows she’s in the house and is just biding his time to go get her! Actually no, he has no idea where she is. He can make ALL THESE DETAILED TRAPS ALL OVER THE HOUSE but he can’t find a 10-year-old girl hiding in a room. At first I once again gave the film too much credit – I figured maybe The Collector had kidnapped her and was hiding her in the room for later. But nope, I gave the film too much credit for even that miniscule level of brain activity. He doesn’t know where she is.

They hide in the bathroom, where of course there are a bunch of fish hooks hung up everywhere. Because yeah, if someone had already bypassed every other trap in the house, the fish hooks in the bathroom would get ‘em. Also I love how dumb-ass Arkin manages to see the hooks and duck the young daughter’s head under them, but then gets hit by them himself. What an idiot.

"Owwww, I could have easily ducked and NOT been hit in the face with fish hooks, but that would have made too much sense and I need to provide more gore for the camera!"

The Collector finally gets Arkin and tortures him in the basement. I guess he’s about to go find the daughter, when Arkin commits the unforgivable sin of calling the Collector a faggot and screaming profanities at him – truly a sign of his mental wit and word-wizardry. The greatest part about it is that it works. Yes, I'm serious; the Collector, this bad-ass torturing serial killer, gets his widdle feelings hurt when his captive victim calls him a faggot. Is there something you want to tell us there, buddy? Some insecurity you feel you have to defend your honor from?

"I spend my day disemboweling helpless victims, cutting off limbs and sewing their lips together, but don't you DARE call me a faggot! That offends my feelings!"

If this movie wasn’t worthless enough yet, we get the same dumb cliché we see in every bad horror movie: the cop who comes up and almost catches the killer, but is then killed by a cheap foil right before he can do anything useful. You waste of existence; you absolute void of anything creative or interesting.

I'm starting to think these scenes are like a neurotic tic bad filmmakers can't stop doing: the cop shows up, comes within an ass-hair of catching the killer, then gets killed off by some last-minute implausible scenario. It's been done a billion fucking times before and I am sick of it. I mean, what, do you HAVE to do every rehashed, trite scene in the book? You really couldn't resist the impulse to put this in the film?

But it's OK - the dog is killed shortly after when Arkin shoves a flaming bucket on its head and then throwing it in front of the Collector's shotgun blast, prompting it to literally explode in flames.

Tonight for dinner, chunks of exploded murderous German Shepard...

After finally escaping the Collector and trapping him in one of his own traps, Arkin gets away and he and the girl get to safety. Arkin is being taken away for his injuries in an ambulance when a truck slams into the ambulance. It’s actually the Collector, who amazingly has super-speed powers now and can catch up to a moving ambulance despite being incapacitated just moments before. So he kills the paramedics, overturns the ambulance, kidnaps Arkin and locks him up in another box! And I guess the wife just gets axed by the mafia or whatever, since Arkin definitely won’t be delivering that ruby to them now!

This was crap. It’s got no suspense, no character development, no real point to anything that happens beyond “HEY! LOOK AT ALL OUR TORTURE AND GORE, GUYS!” Not to mention the ass-load of bottom of the barrel disposable horror cliché this movie has all over it like a cockroach infestation. The whole thing is just one implausible, ridiculous scene after another. The traps were so ridiculous in how elaborate and set-up they were that it's impossible to believe even one second of this movie's plot.

Come to think of it, how did the Collector even get all those traps in the house in the first place? It's sort of implied that the Collector was actually one of the bug exterminator guys who was at the house at the beginning of the movie, and scoped out the house that way. Did he just put all of that stuff in while he was supposed to be exterminating the bugs in the house? "Oh, yeah, don't mind all the bear traps on the living room floor and the fish hooks hanging up in the bathroom! THAT'S JUST HOW WE CATCH BUGS, IT'S NOT WEIRD!" The only other option is that he somehow came back and set them up later without the family noticing, which is equally stupid.

Director Marcus Dunstan said in an interview that the Collector was supposed to be like a spider, hunting its prey – thus all the spiders seen in the movie at various points, I guess. It’s really not much of a metaphor, though, as the film fails to do anything clever with it. So the killer is sorta like a spider – so what? How does that help the meaning of the film or add any dimensions to it? It doesn’t at all. It's not good symbolism, and in fact the idea of this film having any symbolism is kind of like etching Shakespeare verses into a literal horse turd: it doesn't exactly help your case.

Maybe this movie could have been okay if the traps weren’t so prevalent and over the top; if it was just a home invasion movie about the family being kidnapped or whatever. It still wouldn’t have been good; it would have been turgid water-treading sewage without any real writing talent even then, but it at least would have been better than what we got here.

Overall I think this is a wretched experience with nothing good about it whatsoever, and I hope every copy of this movie burns in a garbage can where it belongs. You could get the same effect from looking at a stubbed toe through the night-vision filter on your video camera. With that said, tune in next week for the sequel!

Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.

The Bottom 20: The Worst Movies I Have Ever Seen

Okay, so in lieu of actually reviewing stuff for the past two weeks, I've been compiling the worst and best movies I've ever seen. Keep in mind this is all subjective, and even more, that my list may change in the future! That's the beautiful thing about art and the human mind. You can change your likes and dislikes any time. In no way are you bound to what you put down on paper.

With that said, I thought I'd start off with the bad first again, since I want to leave you on a better impression with the good stuff next. These are the worst movies I've ever seen. Most of them are things I've reviewed, yeah, and the actual reviews will go more into depth. But as my reviews are often humorously exaggerated, I thought I'd give more of an impression on what I personally, seriously think are the worst movies out there. They're not the SyFy-level low budget crapfests like Bear or the Asylum version of 11/11/11 - those films are what they are, and it's simply not worth really hating them. These films are ones that I personally just think are the worst out there, artistically or for moral reasons.

With no further ado, let's get on with it!

20. I Know Who Killed Me

Purely a mess, this film, which won almost every Razzie the year it came out, is the definition of a cinematic train wreck. Nothing about it works and nothing about it is enjoyable. Stupid, wrongheaded and incredibly poorly written, I Know Who Killed Me is a dud.

19. Idle Hands

Where is the worth in this thing? It’s the bottom of the barrel for garbage stoner humor. Idle Hands is a film for wastoid, worthless burnout morons, and a clear sign that the 90s – that decade of charmingly likable stoner humor – was over. After this, there really was no going back.

18. The Descent 2

Literally just thoughtless. There really was no plot to this thing for most of the runtime, and what plot there was just contradicted the first film and made absolutely no sense. I’d rather be in a coma than see this again, and frankly, seeing it is one of the most surefire ways to get in a coma in the first place. Hideous.

17. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

So awful that it almost becomes brilliant. Almost being the key word.

16. Poltergeist III

Just undeniably worthless. A few interesting trippy special effects near the end can’t save one of the worst horror movie scripts I’ve ever seen in my life. This movie made me angry with how inept and mean spirited it was towards its characters and the franchise as a whole.

15. Hellraiser: Hellseeker

I hate almost all of these movies, but Hellseeker had to be the worst of the ones I sat through. Slow, boring, confusing and obnoxious, Hellseeker is just a headache and a half. Your time could be better served driving nails through your own head. It would have about the same effect.

14. Deadgirl

I didn’t really hate this film, because it’s simply too silly and inept to truly hate, but the morals and message behind this are so despicable and so prominent in your face that not having Deadgirl on a ‘worst movies’ list would be a crime. This is a misogynistic, hateful piece of trash that falls on its own face so much that it becomes almost as humorous as it is pathetic.

13. Hannibal

This has got to be one of the most inept films I’ve ever seen, with no clear purpose or meaning to the script, confusing character action and a horrendously unbalanced, lopsided pacing. As a movie on its own, it’s terrible, but as a sequel to Silence of the Lambs, it’s an outright disgrace.

12. Romeo + Juliet

Shakespeare is rolling in his grave. Thanks a lot, Baz Luhrman…you bastard.

11. Hollow Man

Like Deadgirl, this is incredibly misogynistic and hate-filled, but unlike Deadgirl it is much more outright offensive and blatantly unlikable. Animal violence, violence against women…it’s just a catalogue of misery. This was just an excuse for the director to act out his sick fantasies.

10. Aeon Flux

Blah, blah, blah, the cartoon was probably better than this, I get it. But Aeon Flux as a movie is wholly unredeemable. A collection of confusing plot elements and annoying writing, this is just an insipid experience.

9. The Box

I’m fairly sure that, in some parallel universe, it is a jailable offense to even watch this film, so hackneyed and unenjoyable as it is. Pretentious, unpleasant and nonsensical, it's just a feat of amazement that this ever got off the cutting room floor. The fact that The Box exists is just an insult to mankind’s creative process as a whole. Director Richard Kelly also made Donnie Darko; that should tell you enough, but this movie is actually far, far worse.

8. Old Dogs

A comedy about as funny as it is charming: that is, straight zero on both counts, all across the board. This movie is literally the most soulless corporate pandering I think you can get in a movie without simply having the actors hold up signs that say ‘GIVE US MONEY’ at random points. I’m not opposed to low brow comedy, it can be pretty funny when done with a certain energy and relentless disregard for good taste…but Old Dogs is simply the sell out to end all sell outs. Perhaps the least funny movie I have ever seen.

7. Black Dahlia

Long, boring, terribly, TERRIBLY written and by the end of it, you will be chomping at the bit to go beat up Brian De Palma for unleashing this film on humanity. There are so many bad things in this movie, even my 3000+ word review couldn’t cover all of them. Despite having talented actors at his disposal, De Palma couldn’t make anything in this moronic script come off as even the slightest bit convincing.

6. The Uninvited

The Uninvited, a remake of the only average Tale of Two Sisters, is one of the most unexpectedly painful and horrible experiences I’ve ever had in a movie. Just riddled with poor writing and plot holes out the ass, this film is just unbearable, as the utter stupidity of it all will begin to weigh on you like a ton of bricks. The plot holes build on top of one another like a game of Jenga, and by the film’s enraging conclusion, you will wonder how anyone involved with this even has a job at all. I don’t even think beginning film school students could create something this thoughtless and jaw-droppingly horrible. It’s just a dumbfounding trip into the worst the human creative brain can offer.

5. CashBack

Another one that seems to think hating on women is cool. And all I have to say is, get bent, movie. This makes Jennifer’s Body look positively modest and chaste in comparison. A movie that teaches us that women’s bodies are only there for the whims of one nerdy, depraved art student who I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY got dumped by his girlfriend, CashBack is just appalling and should be shut up in an underground vault for all eternity, never to be released. Feeling sorry for any of the characters in this piss-pile is just impossible as all of them are about as likable as black fungus growing on your sandwich. The outright, blatant misogyny is just suffocating in how rotten its stench is, but the rest of the comedy is so boorish and sophomoric that not even fans of Old Dogs and Epic Movie would find it funny – they wouldn’t even crack a smile. One of the most offensive, tasteless things I have ever seen on film.

4. The Traveler

A festival of seemingly endless, tasteless gore, The Traveler is one of the more egregious and terrible examples of the worst trends in horror today. It substitutes realistic characters for horrible one-note jokes and screaming, raging assholes impossible to elicit any sympathy from, and tension and drama for gore and blood and guts. Movies like this are the reason why horror is in such a dire state nowadays, as there is simply nothing there to latch onto. The gore is unpleasant and far too realistic to be entertaining, and the story is boring and rote to extremes I didn’t know possible. There’s no creativity to be found and all this movie seems to want to do is show you seemingly non-stop scenes of these people getting murdered, without any reason to care, as every character is unlikable. This is just a hateful, spiteful film that gets worse and worse as it goes on, without even one iota of quality at all, and I was just at a loss for words at how this even got green lighted. Films like this will be the death of horror as a genre – the final nail in the coffin. Don’t support this, don’t rent it…just forget about it.

3. The Road

If you really like child abuse, little girls screaming in pain and non-stop scenes of nothing but undiluted misery and pain, The Road is for you. This movie is simply indefensible, with so many horrible things in it that it all just becomes white noise. The thing about torture and really grotesque, hardcore shit is that you need to build up drama and have something to really say beyond “hey, this is really hard to watch!” There needs to be some purpose, some commentary or some kind of underlying story that justifies the violence, because otherwise all you have is exploitative crap. With this film, all you get is more and more of the worst of humanity, without convincing enough writing to come across as realistic – oh, and the fact that there are ghosts and supernatural demons doesn’t help the 'realism' factor either. This has no idea what it wants to be, what it wants to say or who it’s appealing to.

2. American Psycho 2

American Psycho is possibly Christian Bale’s finest moment, a classic of modern cinema and has a lot of great social commentary on the bourgeois white-collar class of the 80s. This movie is none of those things, and completely ruins the first film in its first five minutes as it has Patrick Bateman killed off unceremoniously by a young girl. Mila Kunis wins my personal ‘worst actress ever’ award in this, but to be fair, nobody could have done well by the hack-work script. Most of this is ear-bleeding narration that literally becomes painful to listen to. You will really have to turn this off for a while to get a break from the constant self-indulgent prattle this movie tries to pass for a story. There really is no story, and the closest this movie gets to evoking anything but contempt and hatred is when you see a couple of college aged girls trying to sleep with their teacher, played by William Shatner, to get better grades. That won’t evoke contempt – just derisive, unbelieving laughter. I hope whoever greenlighted this film doesn’t sleep well at night anymore.

And my number 1 worst movie of all time is...

1. Rock n Roll Frankenstein

Words can’t even describe the pain that this movie inflicted on me, with its utter disregard for anything that would normally pass for an enjoyable film. I just...ugh...just, ugh; that's the best description. After I finished watching this movie, I turned to my friend and proclaimed it, instinctively, ‘the worst thing mankind has ever created.’ I remember standing in my kitchen afterwards and seriously thinking I would rather just stop reviewing movies instead of reviewing this one. People, there are certain limits a man has, and for me, it is when I see a movie about a bunch of guys that create a Frankenstein’s Monster-esque creature, give it a gay man’s penis, and then the monster is sexually confused because of it. That’s this whole movie. And I hate myself forever for just writing that…FOR THE SECOND TIME.

Christ. Just kill me now.

So that's my 'bottom 20' worst films ever list, for those of you who were interested. Stay tuned for the 'best' list tomorrow!

REVIEW: I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

Well, well, we’ve finally reached the film I’ve been putting off reviewing for so long: I Know Who Killed Me, one of the worst films of the 2000s according to the critics. Hell, it won just about every Razzie the year it came out. This is one of the few times I'm going to just straight up agree with the critics, no qualms at all - this really is objectively one of the worst films of the decade. It’s got an unwieldy, clumsy sounding title, it stars professional screw-up, former child star and rehab-clinic regular Lindsay Lohan, and it’s an ungodly piece of cinematic terrorism. That should be enough to justify this review’s existence! Yup. It is. Let’s get on with it, then.

Director: Chris Sivertson

Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond

IMDb

We start off with what I like to call “positive, deep female character development”:

Yeah, if all you want in a movie is cheap stripping scenes that aren’t even really hot at all, you’ll be in paradise with this movie. But more on that later.

For now, we have some pretentious story being read by the world’s most generic high school student, Aubrey (played by the best actress ever, Lindsay Lohan). She’s writing about a girl who thinks she’s two separate people? If this weren’t an annoyingly contrived and asinine set-up for this movie’s very poorly written plot, I’d say this is incredibly half-assed. But then again, people tell me I nitpick sometimes.

We then see that Aubrey is so dedicated to her mediocre writing that she even quits piano lessons to focus more on her writing. Because doing both is just unheard of, and it’s really like she’s so jam packed in her schedule that she couldn’t find time after the lessons are over. Or maybe the movie is just really shitty, I dunno.

We also see some other exciting things, like how Aubrey has a boyfriend who thinks it’s a cool idea to tell her he loves her in the middle of science class, because that’s such a good place to do it, right? After that, to complete the butt-clenching awkwardness this movie has to offer, the teacher asks him to locate the female genitalia on their biology microscopes, and he points out the male genitalia instead. Yeah, that’s right; he told her he loves her in the middle of a science lesson on genitalia. Where’s Freud when you need him?

Touching your girlfriend's leg in science class while learning about genitalia; oh yeah, true love! This movie's up there with Cyrano de Bergerac and Casablanca!

At a football game later, we see that high school kids indeed play football, and afterwards, Aubrey goes missing while going to see her stupid boyfriend – although the crap-and-a-half editing will make this plot point as confusing as possible, not really making it clear at first what’s happened. Which is a pretty common theme in this movie, sadly. Her friends who we will never see again stand in one place, call her name three times and then deduce that because she didn’t answer, she must be missing.

"HEY AUBREY! ARE YOU IN EARSHOT? NO? OKAY, MUST BE MISSING THEN!"

Truly they should be the stars of the new Sherlock Holmes TV series that comes out next. They already had one with Watson as an Asian woman, so hey, why not? But I digress.

If you think all of this bland nonsense is exactly that, bland nonsense; well, you’d be right. Fortunately the film has other ways to suck right around the corner. Rather abruptly, the movie switches to some pained screaming and torture scenes, with Aubrey tied up on a table and getting her fingers cut off. This is the other big theme in the movie: fingers getting cut off!  Yeah, if the stripping scenes didn’t do it for you, at least you have the finger cutting scenes to get you going. But again, that will come more into play later on.

The jarring transition between the normal school night stuff and this is actually pretty good, but unfortunately this is just the beginning of a long, looooong train of unnecessary, gratuitous gore without any real purpose.

We then cut to a lady driving on the road, who discovers Aubrey bloodied and disfigured in a ditch – insert your own Lindsay Lohan in real life joke here; I’m above that. She’s taken to a hospital and is missing an arm and a leg – in maybe the only genuine moment in the film, she sees what’s happened to her and the effect is fairly disheartening. It’s probably the only moment that actually elicits sympathy for Lohan’s character. A notion that will be ruined by the bland writing and haphazard attempts at being deep to follow…

A tragic, affecting scene that I can empathize with. The movie realized this mistake and thus never did it ever again.

She claims she’s not Aubrey at all, and that she’s actually Dakota, a down-on-her-luck stripper who has truly lived the tough side of life. Or, what this movie THINKS is the tough side of life, but is really just a cobbled together pastiche of clichés that white suburban people think hard living is like. We get some flashbacks, and really, it’s just so trite. There’s no subtlety or depth here, and the character is about as believable as a multi-million dollar actress playing a downtrodden character from a bad neighborhood could ever be. Seriously, movie; just get real. Lindsay Lohan may have been a strung out, disgusting junkie at the time, but, in reality, she was being a strung out, disgusting junkie IN A REALLY NICE PENTHOUSE.

And the circle is complete: it is now impossible to care about her character in this film, after seeing this. Thank you and you're welcome.

And we come now to the most egregious, banal, talking-down-at-audience “symbolism” ever – literally everything in this movie is bathed in blue lighting for no reason. At first, for like the opening five or six minutes, it wasn’t too intrusive, but around the time this torture scene starts up, it just gets really stupid, and it’s ALL THE TIME. The blue coloring is supposed to represent Aubrey, and later on we’ll get a lot of red lighting for Dakota’s scenes. The lighting is supposed to symbolize which character is which, and show the contrast between their personalities, and honestly I can’t think of a way the director could have created something LESS intellectual and smart. I mean, c’mon, do we really need blue lighting for everything? Even for the tools the goddamn serial killer is using?

Did he just buy those at WalMart? Did he get a discount in the ‘everything blue’ section of the handyman’s construction aisle? Seriously movie, just because you’re trying to be all deep symbolism and character meaning doesn’t mean you have to stop making logical sense. You’re still operating in some form of the real world. It’s not like this is a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory knock-off. Sometimes, blue doesn’t have to be a metaphoric symbol for something else – sometimes it can just be the goddamned color blue.

Sigh. So at the hospital, Dakota talks to some cops who are unnecessarily hostile towards her and seem to not care at all about her well-being; just about questioning her because, well, that’s what the FBI does! Get with the program, man. They go back and forth, recounting some boring flashbacks, and I guess this could have been a decent mystery, but mostly it’s phoned in, the characters are unlikable and just spend a lot of time shouting at one another, and the whole thing is a lead-up to the movie’s first love: stripping scenes.

I know I should think this is really hot and everything, but come on: it’s grungy-looking and dirty as hell, the editing is like a rejected Rob Zombie music video and the music sucks. This isn’t sexy; it’s practically in need of a good bottle of Clorox, it looks so grimy. The way the film looks and the atmosphere being set up are like being on the inside of a porta-potty at a KISS concert in 95 degree weather. And the scene just drags on and on for like six or seven minutes or some shit. The story literally just stops in its tracks, in the middle of a flashback trying to explain something, to show the stripping scenes. Yeah. We get it. She has a tough life and needed to take a demeaning job to make money. For a movie trying to show us how bad this chick has it, it’s sure glorifying the exact undesirable position the main character only took as an easy way to get cash!

Real good message there, movie. Being a stripper sucks, life is hard, but just look at those tits and the way she moves that ass! Go to hell, movie; you’re a goddamned dirty hypocrite!

After that bullshit, we see Dakota fitted for a robotic arm and leg that will allow her to at least be a little bit normal again, and to go back to “home,” or Aubrey’s house, as they still think she’s just Aubrey with some mental trauma. Her boyfriend comes over and they go upstairs and find out how good sex is when one person only has one leg:

I swear if you cut out the stripping/sex scenes and the gore scenes, you wouldn't even have a movie anymore.

Hahahaha…ha…ha…ahh, where do I even start? The lighting is all blue, which begs the question: why would you have that much blue lighting in your room? I’ve heard of having a favorite color, but I’m fairly sure this would seriously just make you go blind after a while. I wonder what the process of pitching this to her parents was like…”Hey, mom and dad, I really feel like getting rid of the regular lights in my bedroom and replacing them all with really bright, obnoxious blue lighting! Can I have $300 to go do that?” “Why do you need all blue lighting?” “GOD! YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND MY DEEP AND COMPLEX NEEDS!”

Another silly thing in this scene is the mother downstairs scrubbing the kitchen tiles with a sponge. I just think this is so hilariously inept…you get the sex scene interspersed with the mother cleaning furiously – get those stains out, mom! If this was intended to be funny as hell, good job, 10/10, two thumbs up. If it was intended to build character and show the difference between Aubrey and Dakota…well, back to the drawing board again, guys. You may just have to stay sober this time.

While they’re lying next to each other afterwards, the boyfriend asks Dakota what it was like to get cut like she did. This prompts a flashback to Dakota’s stripping days, when she was doing her thing on stage and her hand started to hurt. She went backstage afterwards, took off her glove AAAAAAANNNNNDDD…

Yeah, finger falling off? Not too big a deal I guess…she doesn’t accept anyone’s invite to take her to the ER like any sane person, no matter how downtrodden, would. Instead she wraps her hand up in a big towel, pretends it’s just a cut, and goes home. On the bus, she meets a guy who imparts some brilliant words of wisdom to her. They are words so poignant, so intelligent and so meaningful that Jesus Christ, Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi would swoon if they heard them. Are you ready, viewers, to witness this intellectual gestalt? Brace yourselves…

Then we go back to the present day, and Dakota repeats the same words to her boyfriend, as if that answers the whole question. Alright, seriously, what is up with the pacing in this movie? I guess by that I’m trying to say that there is no pacing. They set up that whole flashback for ONE LINE. They really needed like a five minute flashback to show why the character says one line? You could’ve easily cut out that whole scene and the movie wouldn’t have suffered for it. And this isn’t the only time it happens, either; almost every flashback is like this. The movie stops the story cold, focuses on some stripper bullshit and we forget where we were before the flashback until we’re abruptly jerked right back. It’s like the director had permanent short-term memory loss.

After this, the movie sinks into boredom as we get pretty much nothing worth talking about for like twenty minutes. We see Dakota doing some horror movie cliché researching scenes on the other girl who was murdered – even going into her house for a pointless five minute scene in which we learn nothing. I’m beginning to think ‘pointless’ is just this movie’s thing…like this scene, in which our lord and messiah "people get cut" guy returns for a bizarre cameo in Dakota's dream:

I'm just surprised there's a color in the movie that isn't red or blue.

He talks a lot of nonsense about people getting cut in half, which is related to the upcoming plot twist that, shock and awe, she is Aubrey's twin sister who got separated from her at birth! Why we needed this insane gibberish in the movie to get that point across, I have no earthly idea.

We also get some even more dull scenes where she researches the random bleeding spells she has and the weird way her fingers and limbs started falling off…surprisingly, she has waited this long to look into it. Odd. I’d probably investigate THAT right away, but then again I am not Lindsay Lohan. And yeah, these finger-cutting scenes are just awful. They’re grotesque for no reason, add nothing to the film beyond unpleasantness and are just generally a pain to look at. I guess you could argue that they’re effective in that they’re really, really hard to look at, but even then, the rest of the movie doesn’t go for these kinds of gross-outs – just these isolated scenes. And there’s the main problem with the film – well, one of them anyway: it can’t appeal to the gore crowd because it’s full of a bunch of stupid, sappy bullshit the rest of the time, and it can’t appeal to fans of elegant, dark thrillers because of the abundance of finger cutting scenes. It just appeals to no one.

They follow up a touching mother-daughter scene with this...do I even have to say anything?

But either way, Dakota comes to the conclusion that only mentally lobotomized horror movie heroines would come to – she actually is related to Aubrey, who really was abducted by the killer, and the two share a psychic, stigmatic link that makes Dakota feel whatever pain Aubrey is in when the killer mutilates her. So whenever the killer cuts off one of Aubrey’s fingers, or a leg, the exact same thing happens to Dakota. That’s…so retarded I don’t even have words for it, but I’ll play along: this could have been an interesting idea, with way, way better writing. But the writing in this movie is about as good as a fifth grader’s school essay, so that’s out the window.

Sigh…we get some really dull scenes where Dakota finds out that it’s the piano teacher from the beginning behind it all. Really, the piano teacher did it? The piano teacher is your excuse for a Buffalo Bill-styled killer in this movie? Are you shitting me, or did we just get sucked into a South Park episode? South Park is usually way funnier than this, even at its worst, and I’m fairly sure there’s no shitting going on here, so I’m just going to go with the default option: the studio blew all its money on getting the gore effects, and forgot to hire a talented writer for the script.

Really, movie? Really? This guy would have been one of the random side killers that Hannibal Lecter killed off years ago in any of those movies. But here he's the main villain. Sad day.

And the motivation for him to mutilate and sadistically torture teenage girls? They dropped his piano lessons class. That’s it. That’s all we get…I’m really just at a loss for words at this point. Excuse me while I go violently strangle and murder the test dummies I keep in the back room for when I see movies like this, to let off some steam.

…

Still there? Cool.

Hey, now that I think of it, how did the police not suspect this guy? If the piano lessons are the common denominator between Aubrey and the other chick he killed, how did the FBI not immediately finger this guy for the killings?! I’m not even making a joke this time – I’ll just let this sink in. So two girls with a very obvious common denominator – their piano teacher – get killed/kidnapped, and the piano teacher isn’t questioned. WHAT PLANET IS THIS.

Good GOD, man - what are you even doing? All the Looney Tunes combined, Nicolas Cage and that plant lady from Troll 2 together couldn't beat this whackazoid in mugging to the camera! And yes, this is the image I am leaving you on.

Dakota kills him, I guess, and then goes outside and digs up the coffin where Aubrey got buried – of course the coffin is colored bright blue, ugh…and that’s just kind of how it ends. It doesn’t even really end. The camera just moves away from those two, focuses on some trees, and then the credits come up. I guess they just figured they’d tortured us too much already, and the only worse thing they could do at this point is physically send a madman to our houses and have him cut off our fingers.

This movie is horrible. It’s just a pain in the ass to watch and even a pain in the ass to think about. There’s literally nothing about it that comes off as well done – the acting is awful, the story squanders what little potential it had in a ton of unnecessary gore and stripping scenes and the directing is a confusing mess that can’t even tell the fairly basic story that well. Add to that the laughable pretension of trying to talk down to us with how obvious and blatant the symbolism of the red and blue lighting is – yeah, that’s got to be the worst attempt at complexity in a film I’ve ever seen in my life – and you’ve got a movie that makes a good alternative to brainwashing people for a sort of Clockwork Orange-esque youth correctional facility. Lord knows seeing this movie has already turned my brains to mush.

Frankly, I can’t think of a more wretched experience I’ve had lately. Just everything about this was botched beyond belief! If you really want to see this, if the plot just looks too irresistible, don’t bother renting it or even wasting the bandwidth to download it. Just follow these simple steps and you will get the effect of watching I Know Who Killed Me all the same:

1. Stand in front of a police car with the flashing red and blue lights on.

2. Cut your finger off.

And wallah! Now you can enjoy this movie with all its perks and wonders without ever actually having to pop in the DVD. Isn’t that great? I think it is. Well, I’ve said all I can say about this film, so I'm going to go off and do more productive things, like banging my head against a wall until I can forget everything I just saw and thought about. Let me know how those steps work out for you, guys!

The images in this review do not belong to me. They are copyright of their original owners. Please take them and never come back.