The Collection (2012)

A man who escapes from the vicious grips of the serial killer known as “The Collector” is blackmailed to rescue an innocent girl from the killer’s booby-trapped warehouse.

Okay, first things fucking last (name that film!?) The Collection is a sequel to the 2009 movie The Collector. Please feel free to click the title to see my full review of it, but in summary, I liked it. I mean, I really liked it. This sequel is written and directed by the same guys, and they are still coming at this on the back of the successful ‘Saw‘ series. So why the hell does this feel like a brand new team have come in and taken everything that was good about the first movie, and messed it up?

the collector and his trunk

In case anyone is interested, the plot for this sequel goes a little something like this. When The Collector takes his latest victim (Emma Fitzpatrick), the only survivor of his previous activities (Josh Stewart) joins forces with a team of mercenaries (led by Lee Tergesen) her wealthy father (Christopher McDonald) has hired to rescue her. It’s good that events pick up immediately where the previous movie left off. I really did look forward to knowing how this would play out, and watched back to back with the first one, it’s a pretty seamless transition. A few minutes into The Collection and I’ll be honest, I was excited! Then we got to a nightclub and I realised this was no longer the same killer from the first movie (quite literally, since they replaced the actor, not that it matters). Dunstan and writing partner Melton may have thought they were crafting a new killer for the genre, and after the first movie that’s what I hoped too. Instead it feels as though they were lazily ripping off the Jigsaw mythos and making a poorer version of him.

Emma Fitzpatrick – the missing girl

The plot of the first film was simple but so effective. We had a burglar named Arkin, played by Josh Stewart who sneaks into a mansion at night and is surprised and abducted by a psychotic killer who has already broken into the house. The house was full of traps, but they were traps that could have been set up by one man. Nothing too elaborate, and in a sense, very realistic in that it could happen. Fast forward to The Collection, and we now see a very public kidnapping, but also a huge public mass execution. The nightclub scene, I don’t know, I can’t work out if it’s genius or ridiculous. I never want to give away spoilers as such, but the traps he set up to kill everyone in this nightclub, it just felt far-fetched to say the least. One huge trap literally mows through the clubbers and tears them in half. How the hell does one man make something like that without the nightclub owner realising. Unless it was his club……..I’m just confused and have so many questions, and sadly things didn’t get much better from here.

Nighclub aftermath

Events in this sequel show us our killer is back and notorious. He is being hunted and talked about on the news, but no one knows anything about him. Arkin is the only man to have ever survived him, and luckily the filmmakers could get Josh Stewart back to reprise his roles as Arkin, as he is fantastic and the saving grave for this movie. He is forced to lead a black ops team to catch the madman and rescue the girl by the girls rich father. The film just descended into an action film from here, and felt like a Resident Evil movie, in more ways than one. The group head into the killer’s lair (the way they find the lair is actually pretty cool and I won’t give that away) and find it to be one maze-like house of horrors.

Dogs and guns are frustrating and don’t bring anything good to the movie

I was really looking forward to seeing The Collection. Finally getting to see inside the killers mind, why he does what he does, how does he do it, and getting a glimpse of inside his headquarters. I couldn’t wait, and yet after having seen it, I do feel a little disappointed. Well, very disappointed. I love and appreciate the fact that Dunstan & Melton have tried to make something new, and after the first film I felt it was different enough to stand alone and be interesting enough to go into a franchise. Now having seen the follow-up, it just feels stale and unoriginal. I had such high hopes, but it seems as though they took a bigger budget and just gave everyone guns. We don’t really learn anything about the killer, and there were just so many negatives for me personally with The Collection.

Arkin face to face with ‘the collector’

Josh Stewart is fantastic again as Arkin, and is the only real highlight for me. I’m not even going to go into the acting of the others in this film, they were average, I feel the script is more to blame than them. Although Emma Fitzpatrick was solid here, nothing more, but she got better as the film went on. Visually, from the guys that brought you Saw & Feast, there were the usual fast cuts and loud music. It was dark, bloody, grisly and horrific at times, but just felt like a really poor Saw film. If you’ve ever seen the original Saw, there is a scene where two cops go into Jigsaws lair to catch him. Imagine that scene stretched across 70 minutes or so, with a couple of extra cops and more ridiculous traps. We’ve seen it before. Sure, there is lots of blood and torture, but it didn’t feel real and just came across as glorified and ridiculous at times. Especially the nightclub scenes. But if you like seeing people tortured in traps or having limbs broken then this might tick some boxes for you.

one of his ‘collection’

And yet I would still score this a 6 out of 10, because I will watch it again, and the way the two films fit together should be applauded, and it really did work. There were glimpses throughout of something special lurking underneath all of this, and I just wish they had kept our killer as simplistic as possible, rather than making him seem like an over the top Halloween style killer. The ending was brilliant and far and away the biggest surprise. A good ending can redeem a film sometimes, and it definitely helped bump up my final rating. If we ever get a third part to this trilogy, I just hope they go back to the basics of the first movie.

Posted by Tysoncarter182 on February 18, 2013

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