Scrapbook

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.