Wow....I cannot think of a movie I wasted my time as much as this. I would compare it to a Serbian Film in that the "so-called violence" is so poorly acted/portrayed as to lose any shock value they were hoping for. To quote Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory "this movie fails on so many levels. Script.....was there even an attempt to have a coherent story; soundtrack......nice to see people with no musical talent can still find work; editing....beyond the worse; the only bright spot is the actress - to not burst out laughing when Leonard is "roughing her up" must have taken incredible willpower. If you want to see a movie that shows it could be done, see Martyrs. Avoid this. Still cannot figure out how so many great reviews are given this.

Scrapbook starts as a young woman named Clara (Emily Haack) is kidnapped by deranged loner Leonard (special effects man, production designer, executive producer & writer Tony Biondo), he takes her back to his isolated farmhouse where he keeps her locked up in a filthy room half naked. Leonard rapes, tortures, abuses & humiliates Clara whenever he feels like it, Clara learns that she is just the latest in a long line of victims that Leonard has kidnapped, abused & eventually killed. Somehow Clara must find a way to escape Leonard or end up dead just like the others, nothing but incoherent writings in Leonard's scrapbook that he keeps to document his evil acts in order to make sense of them...Edited, executive produced & directed by Eric Stanze there are films that are so unrelentingly worthless that it makes you question just how low filmmakers can go, just how bad a film can possibly be & make you question whether you actually want to take a chance on another film ever again. Scrapbook is a good case in point, it's a film that is so bad, so vile, so worthless & depressing to watch that I really do wonder what the makers of this crap were thinking. Scrapbook is a virtually plot less 94 minutes of abuse, rape & bad dialogue. Seriously, what else is it? Forgot anyone who tries to claim that Scrapbook is a powerful film that doesn't glamorise rape or promote it & is some sort of masterpiece of unflinching study of violent human behaviour or some powerful portrayal of bleak & brutal realism because it's not, it's crap exploitative rubbish made by complete amateurs who don't seem to know anything about making a film, telling a proper story & populating it with human beings that you can relate to. Next to nothing happens, the entire film is set in the same filthy house, there are only two people in it of any significance & the opening featuring a teenager trying to seduce her younger brother really doesn't help explain anything or give Leonard any sort of motivation worth thinking about. Scrapbook is a deeply unpleasant film, both visually & thematically with a rather random ending in which Leonard lets the women he has just raped, beaten & mutilated for the previous hour tie him up. I guess Leonard isn't the brightest serial killing rapist about is he?To go along with the grubby little story the visuals are similarly terrible, shot on what looks like a camcorder (my mobile phone camera can producer sharper video footage) in a squalid little house. There are constant cuts to close-ups of vile objects or rotting food in Leonard's house & the whole film looks & feels really cheap, nasty & dirty. I suppose that may be a recommendation for some but believe me it's meant as one. There are a couple of rapes, Leonard slaps Clara around a bit & chops her toes off, there's some full frontal nudity from both Leonard & Clara if that's your thing but don't expect anything erotic as the grubby nature of the film is a real passion killer. Take it from me.Apparently filmed in just 13 days on what must have been a budget so low they couldn't afford outside sound recording this was shot in Missouri. Although the opening claims Scrapbook is 'Based on True Events' I would take that with a pinch of salt. The acting sucks, no offence to the actress here but Clara is one ugly chick. No wonder Leonard couldn't get stiff in that scene. Half the time she looks like a man with her butch figure & short hair cut. Not good.Scrapbook is an awful film of absolutely no worth whatsoever, I'm sorry but this is not powerful realism or innovative indie filmmaking, this is pure crap from start to finish that is an absolute eyesore to sit through. I would struggle to describe Scrapbook as a film, it's a worthless 94 minutes of torture. That's torture for us the viewer by the way & not a representative statement of what happens in it.

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.

Supposedly based on a true story, Scrapbook is a torturous account of the darker side of human nature. It's easy to see why this case (assuming it did actually happen) was made into a film, as the potential for a harrowing tale is certainly there - and mostly that comes from the idea of a 'scrapbook' in which the killer forces his victims to write about their experiences in his 'care'. Scrapbook appears to be one of the first of a 'new wave' of mostly direct to video nasty horror flicks, a sub-genre that has gone on to inspire such films as August Underground and Murder Set-Pieces. There isn't a great deal of plot in this film, and director Eric Stanze has preferred to keep the action focused on just two characters. Clara is the victim who is being held by vicious psychopath Leonard. Leonard keeps a scrapbook which contains all sorts of information about his victims, and it doesn't take the girl long to realise that the way to manipulate the killer is through the scrapbook. But that doesn't stop her becoming the victim of several bouts of rape and torture.I've seen a lot of this sort of stuff, and I have to say that in comparison to a lot of similar films; Scrapbook isn't really all that nasty. But that's not to say that it's a film for everyone! There's a huge focus on torture, and this is complimented by the dirty locations in which the film takes place. Director Eric Stanze succeeds in creating a truly fetid atmosphere for the film to take place in. This helps to make the overall atmosphere of the film more shocking, and sometimes the film succeeds at being nasty without the need for gore. That's not to say that the film doesn't feature any of the red stuff, however. The sex scenes are vicious and sometimes hard to watch, and the film really gets going in the last fifteen minutes with a series of excruciating sequences. It's clear that this film isn't perfect, as the central relationship isn't always enough to provide sufficient interest, and even though there's only two characters in the film; we never really get to know either of them. Still, as a nasty modern gore flick; Scrapbook certainly isn't bad!