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!

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.

The only points I can give this film are for lead actress Emily Haack. She must have gone through hell making this.

Actor/writer Tommy Biondo, on the other hand, fails at doing everything vaguely movie-related. Nothing good can be said of his writing, because there just doesn't seem to be any writing beyond "in this movie I get to rape a girl." There is some rubbish about the titular scrapbook, which just ends up a half-forgotten plot device for most of the film.

Nothing good can be said of Biondo's acting, either; he delivers middle-school-level improv lines (which I'm sure he thinks are super-scary serial-killer lines) with all the menace of a rubber ducky.

The so-called "violence" is at a Three Stooges level of laughability, with none of the charm. He lightly pats his victims on the face, and despite said victim acting dutifully like they've been slapped by a bodybuilder, it is about as believable as third-rate WWE fights.

The very fact that a slim, squeaky, bandy-armed man with the physical intimidation factor of a stalk of celery is supposed to be able to kidnap, beat up, and rape a woman who looks about three times as strong as him, and later beat a big strong farmer twice his size to death, defies any attempt at suspension of disbelief. This man couldn't physically kidnap a sandwich.

The poor actress suffers though badly-done rape scene after badly-done rape scene, a scene of non-simulated fellatio, and a scene of actually being urinated on, by a bad actor and worse writer who seems to be on a sad wish-fulfillment trip that has no business calling itself a horror film, or even any kind of film.

If you're into horror, get another horror movie. If you're into porn, get another porn movie. This film fails entirely at being either. Hopefully it won't leave too dark a mark on the resume' of Ms Haack, who comes out of this whole sorry mess as the only one with any sort of talent whatsoever.

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