Review by Nia Edwards-Behi
Back in 2010, I saw The Collector in the screening room of the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, and almost immediately dismissed it. The film which started life as a Saw prequel came across as nothing more than a dull rip-off, Saw and its several sequels making it seem derivative and unimaginative (which is saying something). Needless to say, when I had the opportunity to see the sequel, The Collection, I was incredibly dubious.
The Collection picks up where its predecessor left off, with the serial killer known only as the Collector on the loose, having murdered a slew of people in inventive ways, while kidnapping a whole bunch of others. While a police manhunt is underway, teenager Elena sneaks off with her friends to a secret warehouse club. Oops! It transpires that this club is also the personal gorehouse of none other than the Collector himself. Luckily for Elena, Arkin, a survivor of the Collector from the previous film, escapes and is arrested by the police for having a criminal record. In exchange for wiping clean his record, Arkin agrees to lead the police to the Collector’s lair, where a lot of running around and dying ensues.
A plot synopsis is essentially pointless for a film like The Collection. Whereas that bothered me immensely about the first film, this sequel is in fact quite a lot of fun, if you like that sort of thing (which I do, sometimes). Now, maybe if I went back and watched The Collector, I’d like that too, having had some distance from the Saw franchise after its conclusion, and having not watched a cheap imitator for quite some time.
However, it might just be that I enjoyed The Collection for the scale of its goriest set pieces. A comparable example might be Ghost Ship, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat through in its entirety, but my god, I do enjoy that ridiculous opening massacre with the wire and the people being cut in half and the blood and stuff. The opening quarter or so of The Collection features a similar scene, or a messier variant of it, but then follows it up with further mass-murdering traps within the warehouse. The film is worth a look for that alone, to be honest, though there are some further entertaining moments to satisfy gorehounds later in the film. There’s some reliance on CGI in these scenes but there’s also enough practical work that it’s not too tiresome to see red pixels flung about the screen.
Aside from the entertaining gore, the film’s pacing is punchy enough to keep you interested in the paper-thin plot. Elena is a sweet enough protagonist to root for, without being particularly fleshed out, while the rest of the cast is passable enough as stock characters. The look of the film is unremarkable, Dunstan’s direction edited to hell in that ADD-style that’s so irritating to watch. Luckily, the film’s barely an hour and a half long, so stylistic annoyances don’t really get a chance to get under the skin and frustrate.
The film’s brief running time means that it really doesn’t let up, and while not particularly suspenseful or clever, the cheap thrills are there and if you let yourself get carried along by the film, there’s not too much to complain about. The one thing I will complain about, though, is the addition of crazed drug-tortured captives in the warehouse who speed around like those new-fangled fast-moving zombie types. The sequence involving these characters just seems to belong in a different film, as though the filmmakers thought to themselves ‘you know what this film needs? Fast zombies!’ but then decided they couldn’t possibly get away with it.
There really is not much else to say about The Collection, other than it is entertaining and worth a watch if you’ve nothing better to do or quite fancy not having to strain your thinking-organ too much. If you fancy wall-to-wall gore and minimal plot, then get some friends round, maybe get them to bring some beers, and stick this film on.
The Collection is released to Region 2 DVD on 29th April, from EntertainmentOne.