This truly is horror in the sense that it is mind boggingly horrible to have to sit through this tedious, pretentious, steaming turd of a movie. Sweet Jesus, seldom have I seen anything so devoid of a good idea. The performances are shocking, the dialogue is hilariously bad and the direction is laboured and ultimately stylistically pointless.

The plot as far as I can tell is about a young girl in a small town who is abducted and tortured by a serial killer and manages to escape. Her hand and leg have been cut off and when she wakes up in the hospital, just to compound her family’s agony, she claims she isn’t Aubrey at all. She says she is Dakota, a trailer trash stripper with a junkie mother. The police find that Aubrey has written a short story about this other character and conclude that she is insane.

It turns out that she isn’t insane but the writer certainly is. The stunningly retarded resolution involves a twin revelation and stigmatic injury. This really is the worst reference ever to the idea that twins can share pain and injury via some mental link. Many of the scenes that happen as this idiocy unravels are shot like dream or nightmare sequences and the revelation that they are actually supposed to have happened is enough to make you choke on your popcorn.

The truly awful story is backed up ably by some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen. We all know that lead Lindsay Lohan has a reputation for being difficult and stuck up. Her performance here was lazy and unconvincing. She just looked as though she couldn’t be bothered and as either trashy Dakota or prim Aubrey she was completely unbelievable. Amazingly Julia Ormond played her mother and managed to turn in a performance which was every bit as bad. The rest of the cast were just forgettable and the killer lacked any presence.

There is really no end to the bad here and the direction was also amongst the worst I’ve ever seen. Chris Sivertson obviously thought he was being clever and treated us to techniques such as colour coding the two girls. All Aubrey related stuff was shot in blue, all Dakota related stuff was in red. He also went for some odd cuts and still frames and he completely failed to build any tension, he failed to create any scares and he ultimately failed to put across a coherent plot.

This film set a record for the number of Razzies won by a single film and it really deserves that distinction. It picked up Worst Actress, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, Worst Screen Couple and Worst Excuse for a Horror Film. It was also nominated for Worst Supporting Actress. It is easily the worst big budget horror film ever made. It cost $12 million and took less than $10 million at the box office.

There were moments that were so stupendously stupid and weird that they provoked laughter but the film is so muddy and badly edited that in the end it leaves you feeling irritated. I wouldn’t recommend watching it even for a laugh.