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.

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.

What a waste of time and money this overrated piece of crap was.

I was pretty excited to see this movie. Most of the reviews I read on the independent horror websites made it sound like it was a new violent and disturbing classic. While it does go out of it's way to be offensive, it fails on every level. The acting and directing is what one would expect from a backyard home video and that kills any chance of getting behind the cardboard characters.

This movie is not below the level of an Ed Wood film like Shatter Dead, Nikos the Impaler or countless other backyard horror videos but it's also no where near the classic that the independent horror websites would have you believe.

I wanted to see this, because I like to see films that push at the boundaries, and because it got a surprisingly good review from the DVD Delirium Guide (Vol 2). That review describes the film as "ferocious and highly accomplished", praises the actors' "impassioned, uncomfortably convincing performances", and claims that "Scrapbook is hardly your standard exercise in prurient sadism".

As such, it is at odds with most of the reviews here, and I fear that on this occasion it's the contributors to IMDb who have got it right. Whatever else it is, this film is not "highly accomplished". For example, in its summary of the plot, DVD Delirium explains that "Clara begins to closely analyze the scrapbook, devising a way to prolong her life, explore the mind of her captor, and perhaps even escape." Oh, that's what she was doing, was she? All we, the viewers, see is her leafing through the pages of the scrapbook. Unfortunately, neither the scriptwriter nor the director have any of the intelligence or dramatic sense needed to bring this internal struggle to life. She looks at the book, she pretends to submit to his demands, lulls him into a position of vulnerability, then strikes. The existence of that eponymous scrapbook is irrelevant; she could have devised that strategy even without it, in addition to which I tend to agree with the reviewer here who points out that Ms Haack looks physically well able to take care of a neurotic clumsy beanpole like her captor at much earlier stages in the film.

Other dramatic or psychological opportunities are missed or bungled. For example, the visit by the neighbour could have been an excellent exercise in wracking up tension as he slowly realises that something is not quite right here. Instead he gets one quick look at the photos on the wall, then bang! wallop! it's all, implausibly, over. Similarly, some of the psychological elements in the captor's rants are promising, hinting at his need for control, but the script can't maintain this with any consistency or develop it meaningfully. Even the filmic device of seeing the abuse in the shower through the camcorder the captor sets up is fumbled: who sets up the camera through which we see the camcorder being set up? But if this film is not quite the triumph DVD Delirium claims, what is it? A bold experiment that overreaches its ambition? Or a tawdry piece of torture porn? I was in two minds for a bit. Heaven knows, life's too short to listen to whole commentaries, but I listened to the first few minutes, and they all - director, producer, actress - sound very earnest. There's all sorts of talk about trust, and we learn how lots of the scenes were improvised (as though Mike Leigh was making a horror film!), though not, as is carefully explained, the notorious unfaked urination sequence. Just a week before seeing this, I had by coincidence seen Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, a famous film that had passed me by, and about a third of the way into Scrapbook there was a sequence that reminded me completely of what Godard was trying to do. The camera takes a long leisurely pan around an empty room and back (the victim is hiding in the cupboard) while from the other side of the locked door the captor recounts a particularly scabrous anecdote of an encounter with a hooker.

But what finally made up my mind was not the film itself, but the extras. I have already mentioned the shower scene, in which the stoical Ms Haack is tied in the shower with her arms over her head, stripped full frontal and abused; well, in case you didn't get enough of that, the DVD thoughtfully provides an extended uncut version of just this scene, conveniently packaged up as a little ten minute short, shorn of any plot or context. Just long enough for... well I think we all know what it's long enough for.

It looks to me like the director's production company was involved in putting together this DVD package. It's at moments like this that we can see (to paraphrase Burroughs) exactly what's on the end of our forks. The director may come on strong as though he was making a cutting edge piece of provocative film-making, and may even have succeeded in persuading himself that's what he was doing. But by their deeds shall ye know them, as it were; when it comes down to it, what they were really making was a sleazy piece of exploitative porn, and barely consensual at that.

Incidentally, this is a review of the 95 minute Region 1 version. The British version is much shorter, I believe, by well over ten minutes. I'm not quite sure what to advise. It's easy to guess at what's missing, but the film doesn't really deserve seeing at either length. But if you must see it, then I think you must see it at its fuller length. Shorn of its shocks, the film would be both nasty and boring I suspect; if you're going to see it at all, you should at least give yourself the opportunity of learning something useful about the psychopathology of bad film-making.