On last week’s edition of FilmCouch, I revealed one of my dirtiest secrets: on some level, I’m more interested in bad movies than good ones. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear my explanation, but coincidentally, I’ve come across a number of stories over the past few days that revolve around quantifying and qualifying movie badness.
Going into the weekend, FILMMAKER’s Scott Macaulay noticed that the apparently unwatchable (and unscreened for critics) Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me was rocking a rating of 0% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. “In our long-tailed world of a million and one tastes, it would seem impossible to make a film that simply nobody likes,” Macaulay wrote. “If you believe the tomato squad, however, it’s been done.” A commenter on that post noted that once a few more reviews started to roll in, its score skyrocketed to 8%; five days later, it has actually dropped to 7%.
Only two of the reviews listed at Rotten Tomatoes are positive enough to earn a juicy red tomato; one of them, by the McVoice syndicate’s Jim Ridley, has essentially convinced me that I Know Who Killed Me is a must see. “Watch the mallrats’ jaws drop as they pay to see the same old teen slicer-dicer, only to get this wacko hodgepodge of the Brian De Palma horror filmography and—I swear to God—Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique,” Ridley begins. The critic only has about 200 words to work with, but he manages to call it a “a surreal, disjointed mood piece about teen alienation,” AND commend Lohan for playing “her good-girl/bad-girl role with wit and an air of sly calculation,” AND toss off a reference to Kafka just before the clock runs out. Well played, indeed.
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