Cold Grip

Review first published May 2008

Director: Javier Barbera (2004)

Starring: Anna Lluch, Juan Sola, Alejandro Cardenas

Find it: IMDB

Tied with Bill Zebub's thick, pornographic Kill The Scream Queen as the worst movie I have ever seen. Unlike Kill The Scream Queen, Javier Barbera's movie actually bothers with some semblance plot. In a spin on the old AIDS Mary Urban myth, carrier Greta (Lluch) picks up unwitting men, infects them with her disease and runs off. She's having a whale of a time with her vindictive crime spree until she crosses paths with travelling businessman Robert (Sola), who takes his infection in a less than understanding manner. Robert kidnaps Greta and does vengeful torture on her.

Cold Grip is a movie so indescribably and utterly bad in a way that only the nadir of Straight to DVD can manage. Almost ten years have passed since I first watched Cold Grip. I've seen a lot of movies since then, and Cold Grip remains tied as the worst of them all.

As can be particular to STD cinema, much of the screen time is made up of endless filler with no relevance to the plot: Robert making telephone calls (10 minutes), some guy talking about pitching a tent (5 mins), Robert walking around a warehouse (10 mins), a young couple talking about how much they love each other (5 mins). Never before has a film so short (not even 80 minutes) ever felt so very long.

The torture scene is the movie’s main event. Unfortunately, it's as terribly awful and incompetently done as everything else in the film. Robert kidnaps Greta by running her over with a car and whisks her away to his newly aquired torture warehouse. He chains her up, hoses her down, and proceeds to beat her to death with a baseball bat.

Presumably Greta wasn't born with AIDS; presumably she has a motive for going around infecting random men. But none of this is ever touched on by the movie or its woeful script. Greta is as thinly drawn as the urban legend which this stupid story was inspired by. But Greta is The Bad Guy, and presumably we're supposed to feel good when Robert takes to her with a baseball bat. To be fair, Robert doesn't fare much better. This archetypal businessman takes to murder like a paedophile to babysitting. Once he's decided to do away with Greta, not once does he look back. No hesitation, no regret. Robert's a killer now, because that's the way the world works.

Following Greta's death, we have to watch Robert dispose of the body. Around this time, he turns from a stressed businessman into Michael Myers himself. Dumping the body, he happens across a young couple camping nearby. Robert thoroughly kills the boyfriend and chases the girlfriend about for a bit. And then it ends. The memories, however, never go away.

Cold Grip is without a doubt one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It looks and feels as if it has been made on home video. Where a good bit of budget horror would cover the cracks with wit or invention, Cold Grip takes its woeful story and plays it utterly straight. There are constant dips in sound, and the actors are all wooden and ugly. "Save your breath," the tagline runs. I wish those involved in the production of this bollocks really had.

I Know Who Killed Me

Director: Chris Sivertson (2007)

Stars: Lindsay Lohan, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonaugh, Crab Man

Find it: IMDB

In the wake of Lindsay Lohan's brushes with the law, drug troubles and sweeping Razzie wins, some say that her 2007 piece I Know Who Killed Me might be too easy target for ridicule. Those same people underestimate how shockingly bad I Know Who Killed Me is, and how much the Joel of 2007 loved mocking terrible movies. Nevertheless, either despite or because of its horrible reputation, I Know Who Killed Me remains one of my favourites, alongside Nicolas Cage's infamous remake of The Wicker Man. Hey, you have The Room, this is my thing.

If you like, the film acts as a quasi-sequel to Lohan's breakthrough hit, The Parent Trap. Here, the twins have become separated and have no awareness of each other's existence. Look out for Freaky Friday II, in which LiLo swaps bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis again, this time having to rescue her mother from the grips of a serial killer before he destroys both mommy dearest and Lohan’s body.

One of the two Lohans here works as a stripper who never properly strips, while the other wears intelligent spectacles and takes creative writing classes at school. As you might expect, it’s easier to buy into Lohan as a stripper than an intelligent student. She’s not good as either, but the idea of any Lindsay Lohan doing well at school is a leap of faith too far. A leap too far even for a movie which ends with her wearing a battery operated foot.

Intelligent Lohan is kidnapped and gratuitously tortured with blocks of ice and the colour blue. The violence is surprisingly gruesome, with poor Aubrey coming out of her ordeal minus a leg, some fingers and quite possibly her mind. She insists that she isn't Aubrey but actually her twin, Dakota the prudish stripper.

Colour blind people and dogs should not watch this movie, because a lot of the subtext will be lost on them. Neither should people with Cyanophobia. Come to think of it, nobody should really watch this movie, but you’ll need access to a full palette of colour vision to fully appreciate it. Everything is blue here, from a rose given to Aubrey, to the gag and pill shoved in her mouth during the torture scenes. I'm still disappointed that nobody bothered to use 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' by Eiffel 65 on the soundtrack. Conversely, the palette switches to red when she’s in the ‘Dakota’ persona to emphasize that she’s a stripper now.

The acting is a mixed bag. The supporting cast of teenagers aren’t noticeably bad, but Lohan creates such a vacuum of badness that it’s hard to notice anyone else anyway - except, of course, for Neal McDonaugh and Eddie Steeples as a kindly Doctor who helps Aubrey/Dakota come to terms with her mechanical leg. Yes, Eddie Steeples; Crab Man of My Name Is Earl fame.

I Know who Killed me is a movie so bad that it becomes accidentally quite brilliant. For this reason, I find myself unable to accurately rate the thing. Technically:

But if I'm being honest with myself:

I Know Who Killed My Credibility. Lindsay Lohan did, with her stupidly entertaining shitty movie.