The Horror Movie Critic

Project Greenlight winners and Saw veterans, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton have once again teamed up to bring us a dirt encrusted horror flick. Interestingly, this trap laden, torture porn, slasher was original pitched as a prequel to Saw.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Macaulay Culkin went ape-shit after the attempted robberies and when he grew up he couldn’t stop setting up traps to maim people? The Collector is sort of like that sans Culkin. It instead features Arkin (Josh Stewart), a down on his luck fellow attempting to bite the hand that feeds him. Rather than a quick in and out jewel-heist, he unwittingly stumbles upon an S&M mask wearing freak’s house of horrors. Arkin is intelligent, has solid tactics for rescuing the kidnapped family and doesn’t do shit that makes you shout at the screen. Plus his bad intentions are for a noble cause…helping his own family. Unfortunately, the only things as developed as Arkin are the highly implausible deathtraps.

The Collector is one of the most violent movies I’ve ever seen in the theatres. It certainly earns its R rating and it’s a “hard” R at that. People get savagely tortured\killed and that’s certainly the attraction for gorehounds out there. The Collector forgoes actual scares and tries to make you squirm with its drawn out scenes of torture. Maybe I’ve just become desensitized to this shit, but they didn’t phase me. The imaginative traps were great fun, but the unflinching torture scenes were hardly entertaining.

This film falters because it lacks purpose. Watching people get tortured for no reason doesn’t make a horror movie good. Did the family do something to deserve this? Why does the psychopath always kidnap one person? Who the fuck knows, Dunstan and Melton are like sugar high propelled adolescents that are too preoccupied with dreaming up dastardly deathtraps to worry about plot or character development. As it stands, the kidnapped family is about as relatable as victims that you see everyday on the six o’clock news.

The Collector is just mind-numbing violence. I’ll admit it had a cool premise of robber vs sociopath, but it goes absolutely nowhere. Had this been an origin story of Jigsaw from Saw it could have been wickedly cool. It’s loaded with creative death sequences, tricky camera angles, a killer who makes creepy animal noises, and a supple pair of baby feeders, but only serious torture porn fans need to check out this pointless cavalcade of uber violence.

Final Grade: C-