Saturday, January 30, 2010

Scrapbook [2000] - Eric Stanze Week

Scrapbook is a wretched wrath of repugnancy - a rape of reservations.  If I wasn't already severely scarred from a lifetime of distasteful DVD dung, I surely am now.

Leonard is your regular everyday guy - molested and beaten as a child - only finding gratification from taking a life as a teen.  Now as an adult, he has perfected his post-pubescent pursuit of pillaging and polishing off poon.  The catch in this one?  He's more scrapbook hooked than your Aunt Ruth or arts and crafts nooks.  With only a few pages of documentation left, he has his eyes on a 15mins of fame prize and just one last victim in his sights (Clara).

If Scrapbook isn't the grandaddy of "torture porn", then it's got to be pretty damn fuckin' close - having beat August Underground by a year and Hostel by a half decade.  Although not as depraved as August... or as well roundedly produced as Hostel, Scrapbook out-engages the former and out-bitch-slaps the latter.  All thanks to it's indie nature - a nature that is truly it's handicap and it's upper-hand.

In typical indie fashion, Stanze works with a basic budget of bubkis.  The outcome...sparse gore (for a torture film), amateurish and atrocious dialogue at best, cheap audio effects, and minimal style filmmaking.  But all that forces Stanze to get creative - focusing on fear-setting physical acting, location soiling, basic yet spine-chilling synth score, and a brilliant yet anti-climactic conclusion.

What's in store for ya?   There's urination humiliation, point-of-view pedophiliac fellatio, death via polaroid camera, toe chopping, tit slapping, pornographic photograph wallpaper, a booze bottle turned bloody dildo, and a 5 mins chase across a farm with a left tit hangin' and floppin' out of a wife beater...priceless.  Scrapbook, without a doubt, is one of the most gut-churning films I've ever had to cower through.

7/10



1 comment:

the jaded viewer said...

I've been mostly all of Eric Stanze's flicks and this one is by far his masterpiece. So disturbing and fucked up, its the flick that indie horror tries to emulate in the subgenre of indie torture killer horror movies.

Good review...