Nick Nunziata's review of THE COLLECTOR:
Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Collector.
Warning Two: If that matters to you, unbookmark this site and drive your beat-up Chevette over a cliff into rocks.
The guys who have written the last few Saw films made The Collector.This does not bode well for The Collector. Of the people in the cast, the biggest star is the third-billed lead on a show low on the ratings totem pole. This does not bode well for The Collector. The director of this film's best contribution to the world of cinema was in co-writing Feast. This does not bode well for The Collector. The trailer seems to be selling a film totally geared around creating a new horror franchise by combining elements of Saw with other serial killer films and by having a villain with a signature mask. This does not bode well for The Collector. The person playing the title character has the birth name Juan de Jesus Fernández de Alarcon. This does not bode well for The Collector or the INS. The tagline for the film is I
your eyes with bad movie. This does not bode well for The Collector.
The majority of serial killer movies that are made are worse than dysentery of the face. As I nestled in my seat I realized that The Collector did not bode well for Me.
The Collector is a intellectually- disabled person.
The premise is as follows:
A thief [portrayed by actor Josh Stewart, an actor schooled in blandness at Sir James Bland's Actor's Institute, located at the intersection of Boring Blvd. and Sleep St.] breaks into a house he's been casing for the reason most people steal... because his bowling alley workin' wife owes money to loan sharks*. Loan sharks! His wife! Unfortunately, the house he's robbing is the location of a serial killer's latest deathfeast, and now he too is trapped in this maze of horrors. Unfortunately he's not alone. We the audience are with him and our suffering will be legendary.
The gimmick is that The Collector, a serial killer who collects absolutely ZERO things during the course of this film, likes to booby trap the houses he commits his hateful stabs in. As a result, the house has wire and mesh and bear traps and nails and knives and acid and other bullcrapscattered around to make life difficult for people (and cats, especially cats). Thing is: he's bound and gagged the residents of the house already! Who the
is he trying to trap? Thieves that may be patrolling the house? Carol Anne? I think The Collector was snubbed at the Science Fair and is forever trying to make up for it.
If they want to catch The Collector, the police should put out an APB on a guy lugging hundreds of pounds of home improvement equipment towards remote homes. Sadly, the only people less competent in town than The Collector are the police and the EMT units.
The Collector is a intellectually- disabled person with a maxed out Home Depot credit card.
I envision a better film where The Collector prank calls Papa John's Pizza and leaves a note on the door saying "Come on in, the money's on the table" and hides in the corner jerking off while the deliveryperson gets annihilated by tricks and traps. Suggestion: a tripwire that when activated, speed dials Pizza Hut on speakerphone OVER and OVER and OVER. Suggestion 2: A flaming bag filled with Collector droppings.
Back to the amazing film. The dreafully boring thief, who has to get money from Robert Wisdom (hey, we've all been there) by midnight to pay his wife's loan shark debt, hears screams from the vent as he tries to open the safe and is faced with a massive decision: "Get the diamond and save your loan sharked wife or endure hours of torture and the loss of many of your bloods". He chooses poorly. Actually he has no choice because The Collector has hate
ed the house with traps. Weird that the thief was able to break in and go upstairs without activating or seeing any of them.
THAT'S HOW GOOD THE COLLECTOR IS AT HIS JOB.
The Collector's main superpower is that he can fill a house with all sorts of intricate traps in a two hour period. His other superpower is that when he screams, someone has that scream sampled into a Casio SK-1 and presses all the keys at once. His third superpower is that he likes spiders. His fourth superpower is that his eyes are milky. Scratch that, it's just a side effect of him being a intellectually- disabled person.
The Collector is a intellectually- disabled person with a maxed out Home Depot credit card and a desperate need for a visit to the optometrist.
Back to the amazing film. Our thief has a little daughter of his own and the thought of someone else's daughter (whom he blandly plays with in the film's banal early moments) being collected irritates him. So, after interrogating the seriously doomed parents of the child (Rescue Me's Andrea Roth and the guy from the Ted Bundy movie whose face looks the transformation from The Beast Within), he sets about the house introducing the audience to all the traps. All the while, The Collector narrowly avoids seeing him. It's scary how good The Collector is at not even knowing he has a quarry running about over, under, and around him at all times.
This must be an immense house, huh? No, it's a rather medium sized house. If you played Hide and Dinklage in this house and were really quiet and well hidden you would be found sometime between immediately and now. The Collector doesn't know there's a boring thief in his killing zone for the majority of the film. And guess who isn't very stealthy in his ways? Thief.
Underneath The Collector's leathery mask: Bose Noise Canceling earbuds.
The Collector is a intellectually- disabled person with a maxed out Home Depot credit card and a desperate need for a visit to the optometrist who listens to Portishead on his noise canceling Bose earbuds.
The sleep-inducing thief ends up going all around the house trying to find the little girl. It's boring as
. Luckily he finds a room whose floor is covered in corrosive acid. Because why the
not. The Collector had some lying around, figured Easter was weeks away and decided to make a place for someone to melt a while. If anyone was wondering where the family cat was, you can let out a sigh. He's being corroded by the acid and is damning that accursed lush fur of his between purrs. Luckily, the thief will bore him and free him. Unluckily, the cat's got half a mind to get out of the house.
The Collector almost discovers that there's a thief in the house, but is promptly fooled by the books the thief put over his melting shoes. The Collector's trap kills the thief's shoes. It is the kill with the most emotional loss in the film.
Because there are so few characters and the house isn't big enough to fit any more, there are only a few deaths in the film and as inventive as the filmmakers think the traps are they're actually nightmarishly bad. Except for the telephone one. That's hilarious. Also hilarious: watching the wearisome thief puncture, scrape, break, prick, and sizzle himself as he prances through the myriad intellectually- disabled traps laid before him. It's like The Three Stooges' Passion of the Christ.
All the while, The Collector walks around failing to accomplish things and cocking his head when curiosity gets the best of him. Nothing pleases him more than bursting up or down the stairs. Except every time, when his victim has been freed by the humdrum thief. You have to wonder if inside his silly brain The Collector is wondering how all of his victims keep getting freed from his traps. He's a forgetful dude.
The Collector is a intellectually- disabled person with a maxed out Home Depot credit card and a desperate need for a visit to the optometrist who listens to Portishead on his noise canceling Bose earbuds who thinks he left the oven on.
The movie has nothing going for it. The acting is unfortunate. The music is beyond bad, and the choices of songs are seemingly an extention of The Collector's evil trappings. The style of the film is so heavy-handed and overt that I think director Marcus Dunston's got red carpet burns on his knuckles from the premiere. The Collector himself is about as iconic a horror villain as Moses. His
ing sidekick is a chained-up dog! When the thief finally finds the kid (her cat, goldfish, parents and huge-titted and boring sister will not be joining her) and gets free he's hit by a cop car. This is after the first cop we met gets bested in the dumbest way in town. He gets hit by a car! But he's fine. Until we realize that The Collector has booby-trapped the road system too!
me.
It's just a bag of all bad.
How bad? Worse than
ing Saw! It's worse than Saw. How can anything be worse than Saw? It shouldn't go direct to video. It should go direct to horseback, riding away from you and me.
I do not recommend The Collector.
On a scale of one to ten I give it a balloon. Because it's a
ing intellectually- disabled person.
* I imagine she incurred the debt when taking out a loan to finance a bake sale that went horribly awry.
*cough*
