Movie Review: The Collector (2009)
The Collector is the latest horror flick to come along that has scads of deservedly little known actors and actresses who have but little acting talent between them. And it shows. The level of acting in this supposedly scary movie is somewhere between dreadful and horrible. It is a leading indicator that The Collector is just another poorly made so-called horror flick that exists solely to make a fast buck at the box office.
Chief among these would be stars is Josh Stewart who has appeared on numerous TV shows and yet is still unknown as far as movie fans are concerned. Stewart plays the key character who is known only as “Arkin.” Arkin is a loser who, despite being an ex-con and finding an employer who is willing to knowingly hire an ex-con, quickly succumbs to temptation. Specifically, he decides to rob the country home of his new employer. Arkin thinks that the family is gone on vacation and as such, it should be an easy haul.
However, the actual heist is nowhere near as easy to pull off as Arkin imagined that it would be. By sheerest coincidence, also present at the house is a masked “collector” who also has evil designs on the house and its priceless contents. This collector has placed numerous booby traps in the house for strange and mysterious reasons known only to him. This cunningly evil collector has also tied up the inhabitants of the house which makes one wonder just why he booby trapped the house in the first place. This diabolical collector also subjects Arkin to fiendish torment while the plot changes from Arkin attempting to rob jewelry to instead rescue the victims of the collector and in doing so protect the very home that he came to rob. If this sounds like an unlikely sequence of events, then you are not alone.
If the above description of The Collector ‘s plot sounds like a torture porn flick, there is good reason for that. The filmmakers behind this particular exercise in horrible horror are Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, who were responsible for the cinematic travesties known as Saw IV, Saw V and the forthcoming Saw VI. In many ways, The Collector feels like another installment in the Saw series. The Collector suffers from all of the flaws of the Saw movies without adding any virtues of its own. Just why the filmmakers did not tie this flick more directly into the Saw series is unknown. Perhaps they felt that greater profits could be reaped if moviegoers were suckered into thinking that The Collector was straight horror instead of just some more of the same old, same old torture porn.
The Collector is the single most overwrought piece of garbage to come down the pike since last year’s (2008) Death Race. Like Death Race, The Collector suffers from sloppy storytelling. Why does the collector go to the bother of creating such inhuman torture devices involving bear traps, fish hooks and guillotines when it would have been so much easier once the family has been all tied up to rob them of all their valuables and vanish into the night? There is no reason given for the collector’s inexplicable behavior. The only plausible reason that you can think of is that the filmmakers were so set on creating an ultra-trashy flick with the maximum amount of sheer sadistic violence that you can get away without getting slapped with a box office killing NC-17 rating, they never thought their story through.
The striking thing about The Collector is that for all of the blood, screaming, torture and the melodramatic music, it really is not all that scary. You do not care about any of the paper thin characters and it’s hard to get into the movie or get emotionally involved in their plight if you do not get invested in them. In the original Halloween, the female characters are well drawn and more substantial than cardboard, so when bad things happen to them, it really gets you. The 1978 Halloween, which has hardly any blood in it, packs a greater punch than the 2009 The Collector because you care so much more about the characters in the first movie than in the movie of 31 years later.
In the end, The Collector is a play for quick bucks at the theater. It is a poorly made flick and the acting is atrocious. Unless you happen to like torture porn, this is a movie to stay away from.