Dream On

The Spawn of Saw Resembles a Broken Nightmare
 By Morgan P Salvo

No, this is not a remake of the 1965 classic starring Terrence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, in fact this Collector bears no resemblance whatsoever and the disassociation is a good thing. Here we have proof that no matter how cool a movie looks, how dazzling the photography, how mesmerizing the score, how nail biting the suspense or how over the top the gore is, there is no masking a stupid story.
Arkin (Josh Stewart) has problems. His wife owes a vague yet sufficiently large amount to loan sharks, and his handyman job doesn’t pay enough to help. It does get him into homes, however, and being an ex-con in cahoots with a robbery ring he decides to steal a huge gem from the house he’s been casing. All looks well and good, but as soon as he breaks into the home he finds that someone has beaten him to it. A masked creep has been torturing the family, and has booby trapped the house to the hilt with sadistic devises. The burglar is faced with the moral dilemma of stealing, fleeing or saving the family. Escape is not going to be fun.
When I replay this movie in my head, it’s like a broken messed up dream that is out of synch and hard to retell in any form of coherence. The Collector has too many hazy dream-like scenes that just don’t make sense raising more questions than it answers. Like, why was there so much time for Arkin to go from room to room able to interact with each torture victim undetected by the glowing green-eyed predator with the leather bondage mask? How could the evil one set all those traps in the course of a few hours? And if not expecting anybody why then booby-trap the house? Why would a man who has a life-or-death midnight deadline to steal a jewel not carry a cell phone? Why is Arkin yelling? How is all the stuff we witness in real time onscreen for 88 minutes supposed to take place in less than an hour? And who exactly is this “Collector” and what drove him to play these games?
There is no doubt that writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan (responsible for Feast 1, 2 ; 3 and Saw 4, 5, 6) will churn out The Collector 2, 3 & 4 in coming years, so we may get answers to these questions eventually. But this doesn’t offset the contempt I feel for the fact that this movie looked so cool and could’ve worked on so many levels if it had a twist or more development of the subplots and some common sense. Instead Melton and Dunstan chose to cash in strictly on torture porn.
Dunstan’s slick directing excels in mood setting but the timing of the scares and gross out gore seemed off kilter. The deaths by devises aren’t played out as much as the killer relies on his knife and gun. Sure the booby traps all get used but they are pretty easy to anticipate.
It was refreshing to see a film filled with unknown actors. Stewart carries the heft of the film though there’s hardly any acting to speak of, just reacting. The score is superb with howling wind, squeaks and creaks, synthesizer bubbling and Bauhaus creeping in with Bela Lugosi’s Dead.
Collectively, the Collector is a bona-fide mess: a miasma of cheap tricks delivering nothing but gut-wrenching, stomach-churning, gory effects. At least the Saw franchises provide a method to their madness, a sense of purpose and even a twisted morality. This movie feels lazy, full of plot holes, and far-fetched circumstances. While the main idea of two bad guys with different interests colliding at the same place sounds rather intriguing at first, The Collector fails to use this concept intelligently, missing the stratagem of a cat and mouse game. Instead we are subjected to a bad-ass journey into the macabre, gruesome world of sadistic torture for sick voyeuristic pleasure, lacking a sense of humor devoid of any redeeming qualities.

The Collector
Starring Josh Stewart, Daniella Alonso, Michael Reilly Burke, Andrea Roth,
Directed by Marcus Dunstan
2 stars