Movie Review: The Collector (2009)

The Collector is a brutal, gory, disgusting movie, but not that good of one. It has some things going for it, but it certainly goes more for disgust than any kind of suspense or scares. It’s torture porn, I guess.

If you’ve seen Don’t Breathe, this is pretty similar to that. A burglar named Arkin (Josh Stewart) breaks into a house only to find that it’s booby trapped by a masked killer who has a few people around that he tortures.

There is a little attempt at establishing character up front, seeing as how most of the movie Arkin is sneaking around in the house, not speaking, but it doesn’t really work. I guess I should be glad they at least tried.

What doesn’t make a ton of sense is that the house Arkin has broken into isn’t owned by the Collector (Juan Fernandez). The Collector has instead booby trapped the house that a family of four lives in. It’s almost comical how well trapped the house is, too. I actually laughed when Arkin sneaked through a room that had about a dozen bear traps all set there.

This movie’s pretty formulaic in terms of its pacing and plot progression. Of course, in the second half of the movie, two people show up more or less to increase the body count.

Hell, they even manage to squeeze a sex scene and nudity into a movie that really doesn’t need it.

This movie was apparently conceived as a prequel to the Saw franchise, which is strange, given that half the Saw franchise is a prequel to Saw basically. But this movie was co-written by the same guys that worked on Saw IV, V, VI, and 3D. So all the Saw movies that lacked any creativity, basically.

This movie is incredibly violent, and people who like gore could end up enjoying this. But it really doesn’t add anything else to the table.

Rating: 3/10