I Know Who Killed Me (R)Grade: D-

It's hard to watch Lindsay Lohan's new movie "I Know Who Killed Me" without conjuring up associations to the actress's troubled personal life. It's harder still to believe that the young adult horror genre can successfully buttress a deluge of manic cultural references -- from Cindy Sherman to "Twin Peaks" to Edgar Allen Poe -- but you do what you can to justify an overpriced matinee ticket. \nIn "I Know Who Killed Me," Lohan plays double-duty as studious Aubrey Fleming and exotic dancer Dakota Moss, raven-haired doppelgangers with a shared secret past. \nThe film opens with a flickering montage of neon, touting in varying degrees of wit and subtlety the life and environs of stripper Dakota. As she slicks up, down and around a metal pole, a morass of blood oozes forth from her opera-length gloves. The intrigue, I suppose, is whether this image is an exercise in the surreal or the linchpin to the ensuing murder-mystery. \nAs the movie stammers along, Aubrey goes missing at the hands of a blue-gloved serial killer, only to turn up missing a forearm and tibia in a roadside ditch of wet leaves and mud. Much to the dismay of her parents (Neal McDough and Julia Ormond), Aubrey's path to recovery is hampered by her insistent belief that she is Dakota. The punch line is only slightly less inert than the film's title. \nTentative kudos to director Chris Siverston for attempting a new synthesis of the thriller genre, but the majority of "I Know Who Killed Me" plays out like a tedious slide show, with a color palette of punchy Kodachrome and a story line completely obliged to the perverse worship of imagery and intermittent sensations. Nevertheless, all judgments of exploitation aside, the film does place on display the spunk that at another time more properly defined Lohan's career.