(S)crapbook

Mikey Drumsticks, a horror movie fan and film student, recommended I sit through a movie called Scrapbook. Made in 1999, but not released on DVD until recently, the film is a portrayal of a serial killer who is compiling a "scrapbook" of his 12 years of killings. I'm a serial killer fan and thought that this might be interesting, so why not. What Mike said was compelling was the documentary feel of the movie, it looks like this might be "real" in a Blair Witch kind of way, a statement that I disagree with. The only thing that is real about it is that they got an actress to "really" allow herself to be humiliated for 90 minutes straight. The movie looks like something my friends would have made in college if we were able to coax a girl into allowing us to do all the things this director and writer get this chick to do. The guy playing the killer is the writer of this hunk of shit and the irony of it all according to the special features eulogy to him is that he died before he ever saw the completed project. This movie has elements of gonzo porn to establish a back story that is just too brief to explain how a guy winds up killing people for 12 years. There is never any threat of the guy getting caught, probably because that would require another actor and there wasn't enough of a budget for that. The really depraved aspect of the whole thing is that it's intensely, and I mean intensely, humilating for the female lead and our killer's latest victim.

Apparently the guy likes to kidnap and torture people. During the process he collects body parts like fingers or toes that fall off, receipts from wallets and other collectables from his victims and arranges them in a "scrapbook." While the torturing process seems to last a while, he manages to get his victims to get in on the action and write about their torture experiences in his scrapbook before he kills them. Trust me, my description is ten times better than the actual execution of all this scrapbook nonsense. The fact that this appears to have been filmed on video makes the "dark" aspect of the props seem rather silly and completely fake. What the video does do however is make the torture scenes seem that much more realistic which was probably the only aspect of the film the creators focused on. Why do I think that? Well, they include a laundry list of sick shit that you can just tell were the backbone of why they made this movie. Getting back to the humiliation factor, our victim is put through the following over the course of the movie.

1. Raped. This movie is NC-17 and the rape looks as real as can be.
2. Pissed on. I mean actually pissed on. You see the guy wipe it out and tinkle. This is immediately following rape #1.
3. Placed in a 20 gallon trash can, the rubber kind, with a couple gallons of milk dumped on her. Then the lid is duct taped down and she is placed out in the sun like this for a couple of days? When she is reopened, the milk has soured and she appears to be covered in cottage cheese. Yummy.
4. This milk souring incident leads to a shower. The victim is handcuffed to the shower head, stripped naked, forced to "drink" a whole bottle of shampoo and then raped anally for good measure.
5. Moving on the post shower rape (#3 if you are keeping count) our killer is having problems with getting an erection and decides instead to rape our victime with a wine bottle.
6. And now this is just crossing the line for an NC-17 movie, the killer forces the victim to attempt to perform oral on him. I mean for real. Brown Bunny style. It's nuts.


Overall, the lead actress is basically in state of nudity the entire 90 minutes. Did I mention that not only is she not that attractive, but that she could very well be a lesbian? Wouldn't that be an odd twist considering the intensity of the performance? If you like brutality and just perverse shit, then you might actually think this movie is alright. Myself, I'm into creepy serial killers, but this was too low budget to make me think that it was really happening. Instead I was stuck on how awful it must have been for this woman to make this film. Maybe almost as awful as if it were really happening to her. But then, maybe that was the intent?