Scrapbook

I had no expectations, good or bad, about Scrapbook before seeing it. Nor was I acquainted with the low-budget horror team headed by director Eric Stanze and the volume of straight-to-video films they've produced. What I sat through was a third-rate, tasteless, and throughout borderline cheesy exploitation – the tasteless aspect probably being the film's only strong point. This one takes its graphic sex scenes to where others have only hinted at. I admire the fact that the filmmakers were willing to 'go there,' to push the envelope, to shock the viewer without restraint, but there are so many negative points to the film that its cinematic chutzpah is all but extinguished by them. Contrived, I think, would be the best way to describe how most of the scenes come off. There are only a few moments when the dialogue reaches a stage of believability, as the rest is addled and poorly delivered with bad timing. The violence is on par with wrestling entertainment (WWE) – in particular the weak slapping. There are so many ludicrous moments that I can't begin to explain – the prologue being the utmost example of it. There's a glass bottle scene that screams I Spit on Your Grave (1978). Was this homage?

The gore, however, is done quite professionally. It's something most exploitation horror film afficionados will want to see at least once. In a nutshell, it's 95 min of killer and victim pornographic fair.

Scrapbooking, a hobby that has increased in popularity in recent years, is, according to Wikipedia, 'a method for preserving a legacy of written history in the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabilia contained in decorated albums'. In Scrapbook, a low budget indie horror from director Eric Stanze, serial-killer Leonard (Tommy Biondo) blends polaroids, news cuttings and handwritten journals from his victims to produce a detailed account of his career as a killer: a scrapbook twelve years in the making and a labour of love which he hopes will one day make him famous.

Leonard has only one more victim to document until his project is complete: Clara (Emily Haack), a chubby bird with a very bad haircut. He subjects her to days upon days of degradation, rape and violence, whilst forcing her to add her comments to his sick journal. But Clara plans to survive her ordeal, and plays mind games with her captor, until, one day, she turns the tables on him and wreaks revenge.

Now I've watched a fair amount of 'underground' horror in my time, and witnessed all sorts of celluloid depravity, but in my opinion Stanze's Scrapbook goes just that bit further than most in an effort to shock. A nasty, misogynistic catalogue of torture, it seems that this movie's purpose is to offend, and in that it definitely succeeds. Use it as a yardstick to measure your tolerance to disturbing imagery, but don't ever call it art.

Biondo spends 95 minutes abusing Haack's character in every manner possible, with no detail spared by Stanze's camera. Haack, an 'actress' with obviously no shame, willingly degrades herself at every opportunity; exactly what makes someone want to perform such acts on film, I shall never know.

I tried to view this film as an intense study of psychotic behaviour (ala Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), but Biondi's Leonard is so OTT, he is hard to take seriously. I tried to view it as a hard-edged 'rape/revenge' movie, in which the viewers sense of satisfaction at witnessing the victim's ultimate retribution justifies earlier scenes of violence—but the payoff is too weak to qualify it as such. And its story and level of acting is not good enough to make it a truly gripping tale about survival against the odds. In the end, I accepted it for what it really is: an effectively repugnant little movie designed purely to illicit a reaction—good or bad—from those who watch it.

Now this.....what can i say about this? I have seen A LOT of ultra-disturbing exploitive horror films in my day, but WOW. This one was a headtrip. The only other thing I have seen Emily Haack in was "I Spit On Your Corpse, I Piss On Your Grave"(which quite frankly sucked, and so does 9/10 of all the other I Spit On Your Grave rehashes), and though the material in this film was similar (extremely graphic violence and rape scenes), it was EXTREMELY well done. And I'm not sure if that's a GOOD thing or a BAD thing. This movie makes you ponder whether or not you're going to burn in Hell just for watching it. But that is a true sign of a great horror director! If anything, if you're ever babysitting a 5 year old bratty kid who just won't shut up no matter what you do, then tie him to a chair and make him watch this movie. He won't say a word....EVER again! If you're into underground extreme horror, then by ALL MEANS, buy this movie.

Scrapbook is home-made horror-porn from a director whose sadism is matched only by his crude-mindedness. Undoubtedly there is an audience for this stuff - there's an audience for just about everything I guess - but hopefully, for the sake of humanity's future, it's a small audience, and one that isn't able to procreate too profusely.

Does this make me sound like a snob? I don't care. If you can't be a snob over something as base, as technically inept, as profoundly repulsive as Scrapbook, then what can you be a snob about?

To call Scrapbook a movie would be to lend it a dignity it does not deserve. Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood is a movie, a cheap, low-rent travesty but still a movie (and quite an amusing one at that). Night of the Living Dead is a movie - hell, even Last House on the Left is one - but Scrapbook? No. Scrapbook is something else - let's call it a stream of digital-video vomit until we can think of something better. Too harsh you say? You obviously haven't seen it.

The stream of digital-video vomit (it is a bit ungainly isn't it?) has a plot: a chunky little broad with a buzz-cut is kidnapped by a lunatic and imprisoned in his isolated house; the lunatic proceeds to torture the girl not only physically but, more importantly, mentally by subjecting her to his incoherent ramblings about his sad existence as a sexually-dysfunctional serial-killer. Ah, the serial killer - what is it about acorn-brained men with the emotional lives of fourteen-year-old lobotomy-patients that makes them so fascinated with obsessive murderers? Do they see something of themselves in these fractured, compulsive, socially inept predators? Or can they simply not think of anything better to make movies about? Scrapbook's serial-killer is one of cult-horror-moviedom's silliest, a snaggle-toothed drunken loner who got beaten a lot as a child, and can now only become sexually aroused by doing unspeakable things to women who bear a physical resemblance to the tart who used to play with his winkie when he was a boy. Huh? Forget it - it doesn't make sense for a second. Maybe - maybe - it could have made sense, but star/screenwriter (snicker) Tommy Biondo so muddles everything with inane speeches and amateur histrionics that even if we cared for a second we could not hope to sustain this interest through our ever-increasing annoyance.

Is "digital-video affront to all things natural" better?

It must be said that Tommy Biondo is only half-responsible for this particular insult to cinema - the rest of the blame falls in the lap of director Eric Stanze, a cult filmmaker who has developed a certain reputation amongst connoisseurs of crap. Stanze, it must be said, is a truly committed director - he doesn't skimp in creating his psycho jerk-off fantasy, but gives his chimp-like audience everything it could want and more. To catalogue the outrages perpetrated by and upon the actors in Scrapbook would cause this review to descend to a level of explicitness beyond what is tasteful; suffice it to say that what the female lead, a spunky no-talent named Emily Haack, is forced to endure in the name of schlock goes beyond challenging and into the realm of masochism. I hope against hope that Ms. Haack's parents never see this pile of steaming pig-guts.

Of course, even the worst piece of garbage is defensible - isn't that what progressive-mindedness is all about? Therefore, in the name of progressive-mindedness, I will attempt to defend Scrapbook. Perhaps one can find something in this heap of buzzard-entrails's rawness, its dim-witted purity, to applaud. The film is certainly not slick. It is not pretending to be anything other than what it is - the problem is that it is what it is.

Progressive-mindedness? Forget it. Sometimes one has no choice but to be narrow and snobbish. You don't watch a movie like Scrapbook, you fend it off until it's over, then go take a shower.

It's nice to see a serial killer flick skip the fluff and get down to the dirty stuff. No determined cop, no police investigation, no extra story to speak of at, just a violent collection of what a serial killer does best, killing.

A deranged killer (are there any other types) kidnaps a young woman and forces her to endure his psychological ramblings and vicious physical assaults. After each event, she is made to chronicle her thoughts on the matter in his scrapbook (hence to name of the movie).

The pretty much sums up the whole plot. The core story is pretty simple, so the filmmakers choose to fill up the screen time with as much (almost all sexual) violence as possible. Viewers are subjected to some of the most brutal rape scenes I've ever seen put to film. Every manner of atrocity is inflicted on the poor girl, and the camera isn't shy about showing every detail.

While the violence certainly packs quite a punch, the rest of the film is mostly a missed mark. The cinematography is hopelessly guerrilla-style; I understand that it's low-budget-shot-on-video, but is all that camera shake really necessary. The writing is pretty bad as well, the killers dialogue is nothing more than dime-novel psycho babble. Not that it matters how empty the dialogue is, because the actors lack the talent to put forth convincing performances, no matter how good the writing may have been.

"Terror is what one person will do to another" is scribbled across the box cover. In terms of portraying that point the film is a rousing success, but it still isn't all that good a movie.

5/10