quote: For SCRAPBOOK, actors Emily Haack, playing Clara, and Tommy Biondo, playing Leonard, insisted that the unsettling events of the movie be presented with as much realism as possible. The torture and rape struggle sequences were played with nothing held back by the actors, resulting in a battered and bruised Haack and Biondo at the end of each day's shooting. Also in the spirit of realism: The sets included real rotting food so that the actors would be affected by the smell of their environment. The dead, decomposed cow in the movie is a real dead, decomposed cow. Scenes depicting sexual interaction were shot with no censoring or minimizing of the nudity or the sexual acts. With the exception of vaginal insertion, all sexual interaction was actually performed by the actors. And, the shot of Tommy Biondo urinating on a sobbing Emily Haack was not faked.
quote: 'Scrapbook' is without a doubt one of the most brutal and horrifying films ever released...period. In fact I doubt there has ever been a film so scarily close to the bone in perfectly depicting the real terrifying intensity of the psyche of a serial killer
Scrapbook is certainly an interesting film. There are ass-loads of reviews of this video shocker on the net, most of which bang on about how real and disturbing this film is. A friend of mine got it from the states, and sold it straight away, because he said it was crap and amateurish...'like something that we could have made' (cheers m8). I was going to get it from the states myself until it popped on lovefilm.com, albeit, after this:
quote: ...cuts of 15m 24s were required. The cuts were Compulsory. Cuts required to remove sexual assault and humiliation, and sexualised violence, to obtain an '18' in accordance with BBFC guidelines and policy. (BBFC)
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So, you know, it wasn't really the same film that most reviews are concerned with. Still, I watched it over the course of a couple of evenings, and it still has a strange kind of power. It's a film about a man who kidnaps and tortures a young woman. He keeps a scrapbook of his previous triumphs, and he requires the girl to make regualr entries inbetween the various assaults that he brings upon her. The picture is cheap and flat. It's grimy, but it doesn't have the depth that Texas Chainsaw used to evoke its ugly claustrophobic horror.
The acting is mostly improv, and the characters often struggle for words or repeat themselves. Much of the dialogue is clunky, the characterisation is minimal to the extreme (a short halloween type intro sets up the killers childhood of sexual abuse), but what you are watching for the most part is a girl in real terror. Even with pretty much all of the nastiness removed, you can tell that she has convinced herself that she is in this situation, and whereas some of the more plot-driven antic aren't portrayed so well, Emily Haack becomes the victim in some startling ways.
The flat picture and clunky dialogue work in the film's favour. Initially irritating, they soon help to build a world where torture and pain are not flashy or cool (like in se7en or Silence of the Lambs, for example), but are drawn out, awkward and grim. Watching this film is like lying in bed with a migraine.. It's otherworldly in its intensity and uniqueness. There isn't anything else like it. I've seen other no-budget horrors, and all have the same kind of feel. Scrapbook uses the format to its advantage. It's still in my head, which is an achievement.
quote:As a side note, I once had a conversation with a man who said that he thought Schindler's List was "pretty good, but the naked chicks in that one section didn't do anything for me." Which was absolutely sickening. I would get the same feeling if anyone told me that they didn't find Emily Haack attractive, even though she is naked for most of the film. They've either missed the point, or they are desensitized beyond even being human.
For the record, it's true. She isn't attractive, even when she has her mams out .
[ 14.04.2005, 10:39: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
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i saw 's.a.w.' which was totally stupid and hugely entertaining. also: i watched 'palindormes' by todd solondz, which did not make me think, a fucking cool chinese film called 'green hat' and a rather charming iraqi film abiout kurdish kids just befor ethe war called 'turtles can't fly' i think.
oh yeah, i was subjected to teh worst film EVAH: 'a hole in my heart'. it's swedish grim. ugly people being miserable. lots of like symbolism and shit yer average sixth form goth would puke at. jesus, that film was a fucking trial. if everyone involved in making it died, the world would be a slightly better place.
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I finally got around to watching 'Versus' which is aptly titled. Imagine hours of seemingly neverending over-stylised chop-socky. The only time people stop fighting is to out pose or glare each other. It reminds me of the this:
Versus:
Versus:
I watched the Japanese version of The Grudge beforehand so was easily WTF'd before settling down with Versus. If anyone can explain The Grudge because I can never stomach sitting through a film that takes near two hours to tell a fifteen minute story. I'm pretty convinced that's what it does. Other examples: Eraserhead.
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yeah, the grudge. Thing is. Well. There's this thing that happens, and it makes all this other whack shit happen. Crazy shit. Some kid is killed or something, and it kind of makes this bad karma happen, that then scares people and kills people. Isn't it...it's a police case..or something....
I don't know. I thought it was bollocks mate. load of shit.
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Taking one for the team..It's the Dr. Benway Sexploitation season!
Ilsa: The Wicked Warden
What with the ongoing events at camp x-ray, there couldn't be a better time to take a critical look at Jess Franco's reviled Ilsa: The Wicked Warden. Originally entitled "Greta", it was re-dubbed and re-titled to fit in as part of the Ilsa series, which kicked off with 'She-Wolf of the SS'.
So, a film about torture in a South American all woman prison camp. They're all political prisoners, but are being kept on the basis of treatment for perversions of various sorts. The heroine infiltrates the camp, posing as a pedalo, and enters a world of bare breasted pain.
It's pretty crap, despite being one of Franco's best films. Characters have been eschewed in favour of bizarre camp stereotypes, prancing around and speaking in ridiculous accents. Ilsa herself sounds like Helga from Allo Allo, and despite being 'wicked', is oddly uncharasmatic. The torture is all sexually orientated... electrocution via the vagina, some flogging, and a bit where a chick gets another chick to lick her bottom clean, but it's all a bit Dr. Who, with shaky grey sets and poster paint blood. As such, it doesn't seem menacing or provocative, unlike, for example, Female Market, which I looked at a few weeks ago. Nothing really happens, lots of naked women talking shit in dormatories and guys leering. There is some naked wrestling in the showers, but it's hardly erotic. I don't really know what the point of this film is. It neither horrifies nor arouses; you'd be better off just staring at the cover art. At least you can't hear the terrible accents that way.
Transfer
Who cares? This is one shitty movie.
[ 21.04.2005, 05:30: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
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I watched Ilsa: TWW a while back. It's pretty ropey, but the opening sequence of the chick in just a shirt running through the woods and falling over in the mud and stuff was quit nice.
Benway - I was thinking about you this morning. I think you should watch charming American indie flick The Station Agent as a kind of antidote to grubby exploitation, and visceral Asian madness.
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Thanks for thinking of me, m8. I thought of you last night, as I watched Ilsa, because I thought you'd watched the first one. You weren't naked or anything though.
I've got Emmanuelle 3 to get through first, and a film about incest called 'Close my eyes'. I'm going to lighten things up with the Von Trier back catalogue, a bit of Tinto Brass, Fellini, Passolini ( ), Kurosawa, and even Bergman! Everybody is always going yabber yabber yabber about 'Wild Strawberries' and 'The Seventh Seal', but I haven't seen either yet.
I've put "The Station Agent" on my list, but it's like number 120, so it'll be ages before I get there.
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I watched The Hours on vhs a couple of weeks ago. I'd been expecting great things as I'm a fan of Mrs Dalloway and all things woolvish and, as I recall, Kovacs said it made him cry when he saw it at the pictures.
Hand on heart, I can say it's the worst mainstream film I've seen in at least five years - and that includes Briget Jones 2 and Something's Gotta Give. Basically, it's about how dreary it is being a well-off woman approaching middle age - you know, the kind of film Discodamage was demanding we see more of.
The only good bit is the unintentionally hilarious moment when Julianne Moore (a catastrophically unmodulated performance, the cheap paste copy of her sparkling turn in Far From Heaven) decides she's going to top herself while reading Mrs Dalloway and that scene is intercut with flashbacks of grey-nosed old Vadge Woolf as she was writing it (Nicole Kidman - awful, awful, awful) encouraging her future reader to end it all - basically like the back-masked messages in that Judas Priest record those kids were listening to when they offed themselves. It's like, Julianne's reading the book and Nicole, while writing it, is going: Do It! Do It! Do It, Bitch! Yeah!
Ed Harris's AIDS-wasted poet is probably the most annoying disease/disability character in a film since the fat kid in the wheelchair in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - regrettably, he doesn't perish in quite so enjoyable a fashion.
The only performer to escape this farrago with any dignity at all is Stephen Dillane, whose impersonation of Leonard Woolf is vivid and note-perfect - oh, and the relationship between VW and her long-suffering servant Nelly Boxall is well done... oh, and Quentin Bell is as big a twat as he probably was in real life...
These are trifles, though. This is a terrible film: a goulash of heavyweight performers and 'prestige' source material that lacks any animating spirit; one can only presume it was produced with one eye on that year's Academy Awards®, in which venture Kidman's grey nose was the most prominent (arf!) success - a victory that'll be regarded in years to come as among Oscar's more risible gestures.
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Most of what you say is true Mr Ben, apart from the startlingly Kovacian cheapshot at the expense of Ms Damage, I agree wholly with your verdict, although I would also add that it does have some very nice lamps in it.
[ 21.04.2005, 08:15: Message edited by: Boy Racer ]
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Has anyone heard of the Denzel Washington film "The Mancunian Candidate"? It's just that the admin girls just the other side of the sound proof screen here are discussing it at the moment. Posts: 8467
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
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O dear I nearly fell for that one.
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Ben wasn't saying DD was a well-off woman approaching a dreary middle age! He was saying that DD had been demanding more films that focus on chicks outside the 14-28 age bracket! Ben is nice, not nasty. Silly Boy Racer!
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quote:Originally posted by London: Ben is nice, not nasty. Silly Boy Racer!
Really? I'm not convinced. It looked to me like Ben was misrepesenting and dismissing what Disco had actually requested (as you say "more films that focus on chicks outside the 14-28 age bracket"), by specifying class and alying her request with the shitness of The Hours (a film she hated by the way, apart from the lezzing of Toni Collette). This seemed additionally hypocritical given he'd already said how fond of Mrs Dalloway (a story almost entirely "about how dreary it is being a well-off woman approaching middle age") he was. But I guess I'm just silly.
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