Scrapbook

Wow, what a disappointment. After watching the director's ICE FROM THE SUN, I thought I'd give this one a shot. If you've ever seen ICE FROM THE SUN, feel free to laugh up your sleeve at my naiveté for thinking this one would be even better. SCRAPBOOK is a truly awful pseudo-movie, all the more stunningly awful because the mise-en-scene at least indicates that a modicum of talent resides behind the camera. Tommy Biondo, who "wrote" the "script", plays a serial killer who keeps a scrapbook of all the women he tortures and kills. Why? It's never made clear. He kidnaps a girl and tells her that she must maintain an account of her torture in the scrapbook. Why? It's never made clear. The killer has a deep-seated resentment of women, and is sexually maladjusted. Why? It's never made clear. As a matter of fact, the only thing that's clear from this stupid movie is the filmmakers' desire to "make something really disturbing"; their miserable failure comes from the fact that without subtext, scenes of violence and torture are simply demoralizing, not to mention boring. Maybe the film could've at least been uncomfortable to watch, but all the torture sequences -- the film's bread and butter -- are so ineffectively staged that all their violence is rendered completely useless. The acting in this movie is so bad: how hard could it possibly be to act out blinding pain? The girl in this movie is so stupid; through the whole thing, she simply cries and whimpers, rolls up into a little ball, says "Please" a lot. I'm not ordinarily the type to watch a movie and say, "If I were there, I'd do this...", but in this case we're talking about a dumb weepy girl who isn't even tied half the time, and through all the rape and debasement, never once a raised hand, never a kick, not even a cross word! I know girls who would eat this psycho-killer prick for breakfast. I'm not the sort of person who thinks that gore and graphic sex disqualify a film from greatness. I just find it insulting that this movie is intended to be "thought-provoking". The only thought it provoked in me was "What an idiot I was for spending $25 on this horse-s__t." If you want to see a truly disturbing and thought-provoking horror film that has a point beyond the lovingly-detailed (and poorly rendered) torture of a severely stupid young woman, watch IN A GLASS CAGE, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE, or LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (that's right, even LAST HOUSE wasn't this bad). Some people here have called SCRAPBOOK offensive and nauseating; I'd argue that this is giving the "film"-makers too much credit. SCRAPBOOK is stupid, boring, and pointless; I wouldn't even do the cast and crew the favor of getting sick at this stupid, boring, and pointless movie. I could go on and on about how terrible it is, but just see for yourself. If you found this movie stimulating, I have three words for you: READ A BOOK!

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.

It's true: this movie is disturbing and will shock you with some scenes of depravity and torture that you've never seen before, but despite all that it's still just not very good. Among my main complaints: - Some people extol the fact that the production quality was very low, giving it a grim "snuff" film look to the movie. But seriously, I thought it just made every scene look that much worse because of the image quality, shaky camera movements, and muffled sounds.

• The acting, though pretty good at times (the female lead whose name I forget must've gone through hell to make this movie) is still suspect throughout much of the movie. They try hard but in the end... it's just not very good.

• The special effect. I know a movie with such a small budget can't be expected to have Hollywoood quality special effects, but seriously, a lot of the corpses and body parts looked like discarded parts from Halloween costumes.

The premise of the movie was great but the execution was just bad. Blame it on the small budget, the neophyte actors, or whatever, but in the end it boils down to this movie just not being very good. There are much better, scarier, gorier, "shock-ier" movies out there. Don't get taken in by the hype.

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

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.