The Collector follows the story of handyman and ex-con Arkin (Josh Stewart), who aims to repay a debt to his ex-wife by robbing his new employer’s country home. Unfortunately for Arkin, a far worse enemy has already laid claim to the property – and the family. As the seconds tick down to midnight, Arkin becomes a reluctant hero trapped by a masked “Collector” (Juan Fernández) in a maze of lethal invention – the Spanish Inquisition as imagined by Rube Goldberg – while trying to rescue the very family he came to rob.
The kind of movie for which the term "Hard R" was coined, The Collector is a mean-spirited throwback to the nastiest, cruelest home-invasion movies of the '70s and '80s. And I mean that in the best possible way. Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (they came into the Saw franchise with Saw IV and are still with it) actually set out to raise -- or should that be lower? -- the down-and-dirty bar. Suffice it to say that they succeeded admirably. Ex-con Arkin (Stewart) is one of life's natural-born losers: He's broke, condemned to a series of dead-end jobs, indebted to his jailhouse protector and gradually losing the sad-eyed daughter (Haley Pullos) who he adores but has disappointed one too many times. The last straw: Arkin's ex-wife needs big money by midnight; she's in hock to loan sharks and if she doesn't pay up, they'll do whatever loan sharks do to welchers. So Arkin makes a rash decision. He's been working a construction gig, renovating the kind of house he'll never own for successful jeweler Michael Chase (Michael Reilly Burke) and his family: Botoxed beauty Victoria (Andrea Roth), trampy teen Jill (Madeline Zima) and pampered, eight-year-old Hannah (Karley Scott Collins), who's living the life Arkin wishes he could give his own little girl. Arkin knows the Chases are leaving on vacation later in the day, and he knows there's a ruby as big as the Ritz in the upstairs safe. So come nightfall, he dons a ski mask and quietly breaks into the empty house. Except that it isn't empty: Someone hidden behind a lace-up S&M mask is busy brutalizing Victoria and Michael, someone who's rigged every door, window and other means of egress with crude but cruelly effective booby traps. It's going to be a whole lot harder to get out than it was to get in, especially once Arkin realizes that little Hannah is hiding somewhere in the house and doesn't stand a chance on her own. On first impulse, Arkin decides to bail and leave his future Dexter victims to fend for themselves, but after nearly severing his hand on razors attached to the window, he elects to stay and fight it out against a masked villain encrusted in black leather, one of those getups which screams I’m-the-awkward-kid-but-being-into-weird-shit-has-given-me-a-feeling-of-superiority. The parents, Michael and Victoria, are pretty much fucked six ways to Halloween downstairs, but the two daughters are missing. Arkin decides to find and save them, which pretty much plots the entire second half of the movie. I know this all seems a little trite and gimmicky on paper, but The Collector does a masterful job of using the house as a main character. As Arkin is inside and the Man In Black is unaware of his presence; the action takes on a cat and mouse quality, as the hooded rapscallion wanders back-and-forth torturing for sport and Arkin creeps into the empty shadows trespassing for weapons and ways to free the family. As a viewer, it’s like watching from the Pacman vantage point. The camera slides from room to room, stopping to note where various booby traps are trigged from and what unseemly battle axe or knife-fortified chandelier its tripwire may bring.
Yes, The Collector is derivative; genre buffs will see echoes of movies as diverse as Aliens, Straw Dogs, Audition, and the Bruce Willis thriller Hostage. No, the set-up isn't entirely plausible and one shot of a spider spinning its deadly web would have been quite enough. But Melton and Dunstan know how to tighten screws, ratchet up stakes and regularly give the knife an extra twist. It’s astoundingly illogical, consistently indulgent and unnecessarily graphic. That director Marcus Dunstan embraces all these shortcomings and somehow pulls the entire thing off seems like a bad opinion on paper, but there’s a clear passion beneath the surface--even amidst all the graphic boob shots and decapitated cats. This isn’t a film content to deliver the same scares or incorporate tracking shots you’ve already seen. The horror game is a tired rigmarole right now, and while The Collector is likely to be contrasted against the Saw movies based on its sharing of writers and incorporation of masked villains with fetishes for bizarre game play, this film’s cinematography should keep it relevant in sadistic circles for years to come. This gets a chillingly gruesome 4 on my "Go See" scale.
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