THE COLLECTION (2012) Dir. Marcus Dunstan, 82 mins 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… TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITEZHIGUAI:CHINESE TRUE TALES OF THE PARANORMAL AND GLITCHES IN THE MATRIX TRANSLATED BY YI IZZY YU & JOHN YU BRANSCUM
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