THE COLLECTOR
US, 2009, 90 minutes, Colour.
Josh Stewart, Michael Reilly Burke, Andrea Roth, Juan Fernández.
Directed by Marcus Dunstan.
At one stage, The Collector was pitched as a prequel to the Saw series. The director, Marcus Dunstan, contributed to the screenplays of Saw IV, V, VI, Saw 3D. However, the offer was not taken up.
This film was produced after the Saw series ended. And it was followed by Marcus Dunstan’s The Collection, a sequel to this film, a re-run of the basic plot.
The film is very much in the vein of what has been described as “Torture Porn”. In fact, it is a very ugly and ugly-looking film which will appeal only to devotees of this kind of gory horror. The tone is set during the rather luridly-coloured credits with sinister visuals of torture, instruments, spiders…
The film starts ordinarily enough with workers on a building site, one of them, Arkin (Josh Stewart) helping the owners by fixing difficult door and sitting down with the little daughter at her invitation to have pretend-tea-party. He is given a bonus by the owner.
There is a complication where Arkin has to find enough money by midnight to pay his wife’s debts. He has a daughter whom he loves, and tries to manage the tension with his wife. He makes contact with some criminals and offers them a plan to rob the mansion, the owner being a jewellery broker, and use his skills to open the safe. He has had a past connection with these criminals in prison.
Once inside the house in attempting to do the robbery, thinking that the family are away on holiday, he discovers that there is someone else in the house. Not only that, the whole mansion has been very deliberately set up with booby traps of the most vicious and violent type. The husband and wife have been tortured, their teenage daughter is missing, the little girl is hiding. Arkin then becomes something of a hero, trying to rescue everyone – with some temporary successful results, but then in conflict with the masked intruder, The Collector, and people being viciously killed. Arkin himself becomes the victim of some of the booby traps but is able to get free.
Ultimately, there is a confrontation with The Collector, a violent fight, police arriving and being killed, Arkin taken away in an ambulance only to find The Collector overturning it.
There is as mysterious box in the house at the beginning of the film, a mysterious old man who says that he is the bait. It seems that The Collector collects bodies – but there is no real explanation of who he is and why he is acting like this. The whole film is a rather exploitative exercise in blood and gore, which only fans of this kind of horror would be interested in sitting through.
