(Long Island, N.Y.) I’ll let you in on a little secret: I LOVE reviewing bad movies. Why? Well, nothing unleashes a torrent of emotions more than being forced to sit through some rancid piece of garbage. I mean, it’s EASY to sit through a great flick, and you can even find things to enjoy about an average one if you look hard enough. But a bad movie? That can get a critic very vindictive, and I tend to cut loose more when writing the review than at any other time. In other words, you’ll usually find a film critic at the very pinnacle of their wit when reviewing a movie that they out-and-out hate.
Take the subject of today’s review: The Collector. It sucks. It sucks long and hard, but I was fairly happy while subjecting myself to it’s spectacle. Why? Because while I hated the experience of actually watching this piece of garbage, I knew I’d love writing the review. I couldn’t wait to get home and start writing.
Now, don’t get me wrong- I don’t look forward to trashing a filmmaker’s work. It takes a lot of effort and luck to even get to create a film for a major studio, and I appreciate that, so I always try to find positives in any movie I watch. And, in that respect, The Collector indeed has some positives. It has a beginning, a middle, and (most thankfully) an ending. But those are the only positives I noticed. However, you can’t really have a movie without those three things, so kudos to first-time director Marcus Dunstan for getting at least that right. The ending was the most important part, because that was my cue to finally get the heck out of the theater.
The Collector is a horror movie about a guy called…well, The Collector. He’s a scrawny masked guy with zero back-story whatsoever, other than he “collects” people. This basically consists of torturing them to death in the most gruesome ways possible. Who is The Collector? Why does he do this? We’ll never know, because A) the story has all of 4 seconds of plot, and B) the movie failed to even make a dent in the top ten on its opening weekend, all but guaranteeing there’s no sequel on the way. Lucky me. Lucky everybody, actually.
So, the story goes like this: Arkin (Josh Stewart), a low-life burglar, is working as a handyman for a wealthy family as a way of casing their house. The family goes on a vacation, and Arkin breaks in to rob something valuable in their safe to pay off his deadbeat wife’s debt to some loan shark. Yet when Arkin enters the abode, he notices that the family is still there and being held hostage by The Collector (Juan Fernández), who looks a lot like The Gimp in Pulp Fiction. Also, every square inch of the house is littered with complex traps: the dining room floor is filled with bear traps; the windows are boarded up and lined with razors and guillotines; hooks and bladed chandeliers hang from the ceiling; common household items are connected to catapults that launch their prey into spiked walls; the stairs have nails driven through them; webs of piano wire abound; and so on. It’s like the production guy from Hellraiser started doing interior design or something.
Now, let me stop here for a moment to point out the problem with all this: Arkin was working at this house a mere few hours before coming back to break in. At that time, the family was fine and there were no traps evident anywhere. In the 5 or 6 hours between Arkin leaving and returning, The Collector shows up, takes the family hostage, and rigs the entire home with enough Rube Goldberg-style booby traps to put Wile E. Coyote to shame. I half expected to see empty boxes that said “ACME” lying all over the place. I mean, the guy even changed the locks and lined the doors with additional deadbolts! It’s just beyond stupid to believe that one man did all this so fast.
Anyway, Arkin is into the safe and has his prize, but takes pause when he hears the pitiful screams and cries of the family being slowly mutilated. You see, despite being a slimy thief, our boy Arkin is still a stand-up guy deep down, so he forgoes the quick getaway in favor of attempting a rescue. Trying to remain undetected by the masked weirdo running the show, Arkin covertly sneaks through the house, but can he succeed in saving anyone (including himself) when The Collector appears to have every possible contingency accounted for?
Now, if you still insist on watching this atrocity, you might find that something about it reminds you of the Saw series. And you’d be right, since director Marcus Dunstan and screenwriter Patrick Melton are responsible for the rotten scripts for Saw 4 and 5, as well as the upcoming 6th installment (in fact, The Collector was originally supposed to be a Saw prequel, but that was aborted by the studio). Now that this duo have the creative reigns associated with the director’s chair in their hands, it only cements their obvious lack of any talent whatsoever.
Much like the Saw series, The Collector is centered around elaborate traps designed to kill and dismember in the most gruesome ways possible, but at least Saw had a antagonist that had an actual agenda, back-story, and reasons for why he did what he did. The Collector has nothing. It’s not revealed how he chooses his victims, why he gets off on slicing them up, or why he feels the need to rig their houses with countless deadly pitfalls. And while I consider myself a huge horror fan, I’ve never enjoyed films that focus on the slow and painful torture of helpless people. As I was watching The Collector deliberately sew a woman’s mouth shut while she wept and sobbed, all I could think about was how the deranged filmmakers must be compensating for their lack of any real skill. I mean, not just anyone can create tension and suspense in a horror movie, but anyone can go for the easy out of making the audience queasy.
Speaking of suspense, The Collector has not one shred of it. Not one second is spent on introducing you to the hostage family, aside from brief obligatory introductions at the start of the film. As a result, you feel no connection with these people, so when The Collector starts going to town on them it’s just hunks of meat he’s hacking up. It’s still disturbing, but there’s no emotional attachment or drama at all. The only character to get anything resembling development is Arkin, but even that’s bordering on threadbare. Still, it amounts something at least, but you’ll still find yourself shaking your head in disbelief at some of the silly things he does that no one in real life would ever, ever do in a million years.
So, The Collector is bad, you shouldn’t bother seeing it, yadda, yadda, yadda. There’s really nothing more to say, other than this was one of the easiest reviews I’ve ever written. Like I said,
it’s fun to review bad movies!
