We have previously looked at this one’s predecessor, The Collector, which to me remains a fairly sub-par attempt at a successor to the Saw movies. Given the propensity for traps within that movie, not to mention how many of the team behind those latter entries in the Saw series are involved here, I suppose that’s a comparison that feels almost inevitable. And with whispers of a third film in this series starting to solidify and take shape, I figured this would probably be a good point to look at The Collection, a sequel that emerged three years after its predecessor and offers something distinctly different to boot. I was pretty pleased with that, as the first one didn’t exactly get a glowing review on these pages, so let’s see how the sequel fares…

The masked Collector of the first movie is still very much at large, breaking into houses or places of work seemingly at random and kidnapping people of all background and ages. With the police struggling to track him, when The Collector commits a massacre at an underground night club they find an invaluable clue – the escaped Arkin, a survivor of his kidnapping ordeal and the star of the preceding movie. With his help, a group of mercenaries track down The Collector to his lair to rescue young Elena – but little do they know exactly what sort of nightmare awaits them there…

Say what you will about the Saw series, but they rarely stood still and often introduced different elements, even when overall quality was declining. Even Saw 3D: The Final Chapter had a fine premise of a fake Jigsaw survivor making a fortune with a bestselling book. And The Collection follows that trend of trying something different to what has come before by making it another sort of home invasion – with the home of our masked antagonist being the subject of the siege. It does have some great visuals to it, which I must credit, and a strong soundtrack courtesy of Charlie Clouser – I was thinking to myself it sounded a bit like Nine Inch Nails, which of course made sense when I saw that name attached. The performances are passable enough, although the macho bravado of our tough guy mercenaries does rankle a bit – they’re not terribly well developed, and I don’t feel like the film has all the emotional impact it is angling for.

I’d also take issue with some of the traps involved here – they stretched credibility slightly in the first part of this series, but to me the believability really goes way past breaking point. It seems like The Collector almost has some sort of sixth sense or prognostication as to where people are going to step, with traps in just the right places, then when our main protagonists run off they somehow seem to escape into an area where there are no traps at all. It suffers from problems with internal logic, for all the traps are as interesting and innovative as you might expect.

Still, all things considered, for me this is better than the movie before by a reasonable margin – there were a lot of intriguing ideas here, and while they may not be delivered to absolute perfection, I do very much appreciate the efforts at originality here. It may not be exactly ground-breaking, but it’s evident the team involved have certainly reached for something fresher here than their first take.

RATING: 4.5/10. While this one was entertaining enough, and I can’t really say I was ever that bored, when you look at this one in the cold light of day there are plenty of problems to be found. There were concepts and plenty of visuals that I liked, but the whole thing just doesn’t feel quite as well thought through as it might be. Traps seem to be ideally placed, and the cast of characters have that ‘horror curse’ of being pretty thin and one-dimensional. I suspect that there is a better film lurking beneath the surface of this one somewhere, but it doesn’t quite all click into place. I’m sure I’ll probably complete the trilogy – certainly to review the finale if nothing else – but I can’t say I’m absolutely buzzing to get onto it. Hopefully it can continue on the upward curve anyway…

Suffice to say, I was a big fan of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. While it was far from director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s debut – he has directing credits all the way back into the mid-1970s – it was a landmark movie for the director, a startling cyberpunk nightmare presented in cold black and white, and a film quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It landed a very close third in my top movies of 2020 list (movies watched in 2020, that is) and it was a close call among that top three. As such, it’s fair to say that the sequel has a good bit to live up to.

Sadly, I can’t say this one hit the mark quite as successfully, despite following at least some of the same formula. In many ways it’s a more ambitious movie, with the cast of characters headed up by Tanaguchi Tomoo, his wife Kana and his son Minori. When his son is kidnapped, Tanaguchi is determined to get him back, but finds that his kidnappers are a group of metal-worshipping cultists. They proceed to capture Tanaguchi and give him an injection, with leads to a shocking cybernetic transformation for him. But the battle is far from over, and it’s not long before Kana is taken too and a climactic final struggle ensues…

That might not sound too painful, of course, but somehow this one just lacked the curious charm of its predecessor for me. Maybe the black and white made the effects hold up that bit better, because while they are ambitious for the early 90s, for me they don’t look a patch on the first installment. Some of them end up looking genuinely hokey, and that rather jolted me out of things. The story was a little too busy and seemed to sort of recapitulate, and I honestly just found the whole thing too noisy and over the top and frustrating.

I think this is trying to be more of an action film at times, whereas the original was far more of a body horror with less of that sort of shoot-em-up feel (though admittedly there was a little of that). For me there are too many characters involved in the story too, with the pared down cast of the first working far better. Maybe I shouldn’t keep making these kinds of comparisons, but when the same director comes back to the same universe you almost can’t help yourself. I also think the longer runtime doesn’t really help – the whole thing feels a bit spun out, whereas the bare hour of The Iron Man feels significantly tighter. Admittedly an hour and twenty minutes isn’t exactly long, it still felt like a bit of a drag.

I suppose I should caveat the above by saying I don’t think this movie is terrible, but more average when you take everything into account. Of course, there is a third installment to this series, which we had to wait an awful lot longer for (The Bullet Man landed in 2010), and I will be checking that out in due course to see is Tsukamoto can recapture that absolute magic of the original.

RATING: 5.5/10. I was excited for this one – the poster is absolutely great too, and that had me buzzing even more – but it didn’t land anywhere near the first for me. If you enjoyed part one it’s probably worth a look, but I would suggest tempering your expectations. It feels like a hollow imitation in many ways, and in trying to expand in runtime and develop some of the ideas from The Iron Man it ends up rather losing something. The whole metal cultists idea never really lands in my opinion, and with that being such a central part of things that’s a big stumbling block. The switch to colour for me is not a benefit, and actually harms this one. It’s all just rather messy and I couldn’t help but feel a little deflated in the end – it’s not a bad film, but it ain’t great, and sadly I was expecting it to be great…

It was a while back that we looked at one of the early works of Japanese director Shozin Fukui in the shape of Gerorisuto, a pretty discombobulating, unsettling and ultimately inconclusive short film seemingly shot guerrilla-style. And while I know that the director is better known for his features, I felt like it made more sense to tick off more of the short works that came first before coming to the likes of 964 Pinocchio and Rubber’s Lover. So, in that spirit, here’s a swift look at 1988’s Caterpillar…

In many ways this one reminds me of Gerorisuto, in that it tends to follow characters around the streets of a Japanese city with a whole host of different camera effects. We have a businessman at a train station, a young lady lunching in a park, a girl walking in the suburbs, a techno-goth (I think) having a hard time holding himself upright and more besides. And on top of that we have a very strange creature that we see in intermittent flashes, an insectoid creature that looks like it’s made at least in part out of tin foil (it’s hard to shake that impression once you clock it) and possessing a near-human face. As I type that I know it might sound like that’s a criticism of the effects, but it does look weird and come over pretty well, and there’s something in the way it moves that makes me distinctly uneasy to watch, especially when accompanied by the sound effect that goes with it. In fact, the sound is one of the better features of this one, with that element always seeming to hit home. Each of the characters goes through some strong emotion, with it being intimated rather than shown that the creature is having some sort of effect on them – nothing is ever made crystal clear on that front, and it’s hard to know if that would add to the short film or detract from it.

Sadly, what this also shares with Gerorisuto is a sense that I don’t honestly know why I watched it, or what I was really meant to take away. There are some interesting visuals, but the idea feels delivered so lightly and uncertainly that it doesn’t really leave a lasting impression. I’ve got no particular problem with doing some of the work with my imagination, but Caterpillar feels like it is asking me to just do too much of the heavy lifting. If you can come up with a firm interpretation here, you’re a better man than me, and maybe you’ll get more out of it as a result, but in the end it’s more guesswork than really feels comfortable. There is something I liked about the essence of Fukui’s work, and I really hope that when he has that scope and space of a longer runtime he can deliver something ultimately more satisfying. Just because it’s a short film doesn’t mean you have to leave everything unfinished, after all…

RATING: 4.5/10. There are some flashes of promise in here, with some intriguing visuals as well as some great sound effects and music used to good effect. But in the end what could have been a fine idea to develop feels completely undercooked, and just left me feeling a little deflated. A better ending to this one would certainly have carried this one to another level, but sadly it just wasn’t there. The director certainly has a cult following, but I suspect that’s more based on other offerings than this one…

Wait, wait, let me get this straight. This movie stars Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, has a soundtrack from none other than Danny Elfman, and I get to review it for Film Gutter? What in the hell can this one be about to get onto this particular piece of webspace? Well, I very much imagine Freeway would be about the strangest film that either of those two notable actors have appeared in, a movie that screams 90s at every whilst also treading down some pretty disturbing roads. And funnily enough, this one is a road movie of sorts.

The story follows 15-year-old Vanessa Lutz, played by Witherspoon, who lives in a rough neighbourhood with her prostitute mother and her stepfather, who takes too much interest in young Vanessa for comfort. When her mother is arrested, Vanessa decides the time has come to get away from it all and head to her grandma’s, so she steals a car and hits the road, only to break down before long. However she is soon ‘rescued’ at the roadside by child therapist Bob Wolverton, who hides a distinctly dark secret that puts Vanessa into the path of danger. After that, every begins to spiral completely out of control and takes you places you might never have expected.

That’s some of the plot, and I don’t really want to ruin the whole thing for you – there’s almost too much happens here in an hour and forty minutes to really take in. Suffice to say (and the blurb will tell you this, so it’s no real spoiler) the idea is that it’s a spin on Little Red Riding Hood, with Witherspoon as a vulnerable Little Red trying to get to grandma’s and Sutherland as a predatory big bad wolf. But it does go off in directions the fairy tale never did…

I have thought long and hard about what to say in this review, because this movie is just so difficult to interpret. The above sounds absolutely horrible, and in many places it is, with plenty of scenes of violence and more than hints of paedophilia. Our protagonist Lutz goes through the ringer brutally in this movie, and it can be an uneasy watch. But with that said, there’s also a sense that the movie is sometimes going for laughs, or maybe inadvertently trying to push the envelope so far that we slip into unintentional comedy. The end result is a movie that probably would have been be great if it were simpler – given the cast and some of that dark core concept – but simply ends up just feeling a sensationalised clusterf**k. The only thing I can adequately compare it to is Asia Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things – it’s got that some off-kilter tone that I still don’t really know how to compute. Am I meant to be laughing, or crying, or a little of both? And are those things you can achieve in one movie? Have you pushed the extremes so far that you’ve somehow managed to lapse into self-parody, leaving me utterly baffled?

Like last week’s movie The Evil Within, this one almost deserves to be witnessed despite my own mixed feelings on it. Freeway seems to have built up a bit of a cult following over time, which I can understand given its unique nature, and also spawned a sequel in Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby. Do I want to check that one out as well for the column? I really don’t know – I might do it at some point out of grim curiosity, just to see if it keeps on down that same path. It is a totally different cast, so I can only assume that what links them together is the name and maybe the style of the two films…

RATING: 4.5/10. I have been up and down the grades for this one, though honestly it was never looking at a 9 or 10 even on those befuddled first impressions. This one for me has wilted a bit under the lights while I’ve considered it. It all just made me feel really uneasy – not in the way that some of the more confronting extreme horror might, but in terms of not knowing who this was for and what the director was trying to say to me. I don’t think it was anything positive, mind, and ultimately large parts of this are pretty much – to paraphrase the bard - just sound and fury signifying nothing. As such, I’m going to come in slightly under average at 4.5/10 – this might appeal to some of you, although I’d probably only recommend it if you’re into really odd film curiosities in this vein.