'I Know Who Killed Me' and the death of Lindsay Lohan's career

The stripper who never strips

The most lackadaisical stripping you've ever seen. The raspiest voiced young person you've ever heard. And a random hairless cat with very pronounced testicles. These are just a few of the pleasures of I Know Who Killed Me, one of the best bad movies of all time.

I can't remember a film I've seen that had more pathetic attempts at foreshadowing with no payoff. The film opens with a series of scenes that are edited so poorly and end on such off-beat moments that I can only assume the filmmakers were doing the best they could with what little footage they could use.

The whole enterprise feels like a Tommy Wiseau film with a bigger budget.

This film, I guess, marks the beginning of the long descent of Lindsay Lohan. I have never believed, like some people, that she was a great actress. She gave a serviceable lead performance in Mean Girls and didn't ruin A Prairie Home Companion. And I'm sorry but Freaky Friday is Jamie Lee Curtis' showcase from start to finish.

What Lohan did have was star quality, and of course, had she not become a tragic tabloid mainstay she might have had an interesting career. Instead, her off-screen antics made her box office poison and, reportedly, impossible to work with.

This film is exploitative trash -- too gory and grim to really be fun -- but still with enough unbridled camp to make it pretty watchable, despite being incredibly cheap-looking and narratively almost incomprehensible. It is pretty irredeemably gross, I will give it that.

So why was this movie even made? I suppose it was inspired by the prurient interest on the part of some filmgoers in seeing Lohan naked. But she is never nude in the movie -- and her one sex scene features her removing a prosthetic leg. Meanwhile, characters are introduced with little or no context and the camerawork is shoddy at best.

But I would argue this movie has value -- as a comedy. It's so ludicrous that it's quite funny. Like most great bad movies, it really aspires to be sophisticated. But unlike top-notch thrillers about serial killers (think Seven or Silence of the Lambs) it forgot to be smart or sensitive.

Look at me act!

Take for instance a scene where Lohan discovers -- spoiler alert -- that her arm and leg have been amputated. It should be harrowing but it ends up hilarious because her acting is on par with a bad Hallmark movie and when the big twist comes -- SPOILER ALERT -- that Lohan's personality is fused with an identical twin stripper named Dakota -- it really kicks into high gear.

There are few things in the movies more comically awful than someone attempting to act 'badass' badly. Lohan -- as Dakota -- spits out her lines with a grizzled frankness which I imagine she thought would affect coolness but it actuality undermines the movie, which was on very shaky ground to begin with.

I still think she could salvage her career. Even though I am ragging on her I don't have any ill will against her. Addiction is no joke. And clearly her parents are not exactly a walk in the park. I wouldn't say I am rooting for her -- her ersatz political statements have been too much for me to bear -- but I'd pay to see a movie with her in it, in theory.

She needs to lampoon her persona -- she tried to a little bit in Machete -- but she needs to go even further and she has to do it better than she did during her last tepid appearance on Saturday Night Live. A little sense of humor about yourself goes a long way.

In fact she should play herself -- a la Anna Faris in Keanu -- and completely have a ball playing up over-the-top things she does or we think she does, because her biggest flaw (which is on display in this movie) is she takes herself too seriously. She works too hard at acting and the effort is unflattering (she even gets upstaged by her severed limb in one scene).

She should just be herself and people will be entertained.