The Collector – Torture Movie

The Collector is horror movie rated R for pervasive sadistic bloody violence, language and some sexuality/nudity. The Collector is torture porn, the new face of the horror genre. It’s not for the weak of spirit or for the faint of heart. It sets a new standard for sadism in American cinema.

In many ways, The Collector feels like another installment in the Saw series. In The Collector, as in the Hostel and Saw movies, the tension of the chase takes second place to the graphic violence of the actual torture. This movie scrapes the bottom of the torture porn barrel by presenting torture for the sake of torture.

The pitch is simple: a workman named Arkin (Josh Stewart) returns to the house he has been working on to steal a valuable gem from the safe. When he gets there, he realizes he has company: a silent invader, wearing the leather mask, has filled the house with traps, locked the doors and windows, and is in the process of torturing the residents to death. Although he’s a burglar, Arkin is also something of a hero and he creeps through the house, one step ahead of the Collector (Juan Fernandez), trying to rescue the occupants. In a nightmarish hour, Arkin faces the moral dilemma of finishing his burglary and saving his own skin, or trying to save this family that employed him. They’re prisoners inside their own home – bloodied and doomed if Arkin doesn’t make the right choice.

That’s as far as we go with a plot. The rest of this film is one bloody, anguishing torture scene after another – limbs crunching in bear traps, tongues being cut off, hair and skin sizzling in battery acid. The Collector will tie you up, drive nails through your feet, remove teeth with a hammer and chisel and sew up your lips, all in the comfort of your own home. This needle-in-the-eye sadism is brought to you by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the minds behind Saw IV through VI.

Every scene deliberately and slowly builds the tension – never turning away from the ultimate gory outcome. The Collector’s choice of weapons adds another level of apprehension. He doesn’t use a slew of preposterous Saw-like torture devices to hunt and trap his victims. Instead, his tools are fairly primitive by comparison and ultimately more terrifying. There’s five or six locks on the front door, a hanging chandelier with knives pointing downward, a dozen bear traps, windows with razor blades, hanging fishhooks, a wall with spikes, a phone receiver with a nail sticking out of it, and various other devices. To top it all off, there’s a vicious dog – you know, just in case.

The movie is shot with style and has some genuine shocks. There’s a weird pervading sense of dread in the daytime scenes at the beginning, including a nice little sequence involving a wasp nest. Everyone has fallen into the spider’s web, as the movie is more than willing to show you in its depiction of bug metaphors. Scenes of Arkin interacting with the family members are given are infused with menace, as if the whole world is not quite right. The camera never lingers. It is horror that relishes in the brutality of the kill rather than forcing the audience to endure the awfulness of the torture. The movie has moments of pure visual punch that are thrilling, boosting the creep factor around the home and setting a forbidding atmosphere of dread in the early going. Dunstan’s heavy-handed style tries to force-feed fear with obnoxious music (which runs throughout the movie with no let-up), pseudo-dramatic slow motion and oodles of “edgy” torture porn aesthetics: dingy basements, oversaturated and decayed effects.

The masked killer is fairly interesting. Unlike most unnamed masked killers, the Collector allows its killer to be seen both as deliberately human and gives him an effectively creepy visage that won’t let you take your eyes off of him for a moment when he’s on screen. He is not a character at all, but rather a force of nature, prowling through the shadows like a creature of the night always out for blood.

We never learn who – or what – this Collector is, or what, exactly, he collects, or even his motivation for slaughtering the already insufferable Chase family. Why the booby traps? Why the torture? Seems like a waste of time if you’re just going to throw people into boxes. Unless of course there are other important aspects to the killer’s psychological makeup which explains why he torments his victims like a kid pulls wings off a fly. And can Arkin eventually stop the Collector? We’ll have to wait for the sequel to find that out…

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