THE COLLECTION (2012)

Studio:       LD Entertainment
Director:    Marcus Dunstan
Writer:       Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan
Producer:  Mickey Liddell, Jennifer Hilton, Julie Richardson, Brett Forbes, Patrick Rizzotti
Stars:     Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Christopher McDonald, Lee Tergesen, Andre Royo, Navi Rawat, Randall Archer

Review Score:

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Summary:

Desperate to locate a missing girl, a specialized assault team uses The Collector’s only known survivor to lead them on a raid of the killer’s deadly lair.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Mr. Peters and his daughter Elena are discussing the death of the girl’s mother when they are struck by another vehicle. A montage of news clips recounts The Collector’s killing methods and states that 50 people have gone missing. The latest person to disappear is identified as Arkin O’Brien from the first film.

Elena is putting in her hearing aid when she receives a call from her boyfriend that he will not be able to see her that night. Some friends pick up Elena and take her to a secret warehouse rave where entry is by password only. Elena finds her boyfriend Brian inside with another woman and she leaves after punching him. In another room, Elena finds a latched trunk. She opens it and Arkin falls out. Meanwhile, The Collector bars the doors to the dance floor and releases a giant thresher trap that grinds up all of the partygoers en masse. Those not caught in the thresher are crushed by a hydraulic press while Elena has to watch helplessly. The Collector captures Elena and puts her in the trunk while Arkin escapes, using a dead body to cushion the fall when he jumps out of a window. Arkin breaks his arm and is taken to a hospital. The Collector drives away in his truck with Elena trapped in the trunk.

Arkin’s wife Lisa visits him in the hospital. He notices a bouquet of flowers with a card that says, “For the collection – get well soon – can’t wait to meet the family.” Arkin warns her to leave for her mother’s. A man named Lucello then comes to see Arkin. He works for Mr. Peters and his objective is to find Elena. He has assembled an assault team (Lin, Dre, Wally, and Lisa) and wants Arkin to lead him to The Collector.

From a hole in her trunk, Elena watches The Collector torture a man and staple a mask to his face. Arkin shows Lucello the cuts on his arm that he made when he was abducted. The scar pattern indicates where and when the truck made stops and turns after his abduction and leads them to an abandoned hotel. Elena rigs a strap that lets her undo the latch on her trunk. She escapes and finds a dead body in another trunk. When The Collector returns, she hides. The Collector sees her open trunk and releases jars of large spiders to find her and crawl on her. Arkin picks the lock outside and gets the assault team inside the hotel, which sets off an alarm and distracts The Collector from Elena. His part complete, Arkin wants to leave but Lucello makes him go in at gunpoint. Elena shakes off the spiders and enters the ventilation system through a grate. Lin is stabbed to death by The Collector. Lisa shoots a psychotic person off of Arkin. They realize that The Collector is drugging his victims to behave like animals. The team kills several more of these people that attack them.

Elena enters a room and lets another girl, Abby, out of a trunk. She is made up like a doll with excessive makeup. She has been brainwashed but Elena convinces her to leave. The assault team finds a boy whose head is wired with a bomb and explodes. A ceiling with spikes comes down and impales Dre. Arkin uses the panic to go his own way. The Collector sneaks up behind him, but Arkin gets away in the darkness when a light bulb flickers. Abby sees Elena’s hearing aid and panics, muttering about Elena having a weakness and her being a test for Abby from The Collector. She falls to the ground in hysteria as The Collector enters and Elena runs away. Arkin goes down a chute and lands on a pile of body parts. He finds a lab with bones and body parts assembled in large fluid containers. Elena’s hearing aid falls on a bear trap, but she is able to grab it before it snaps closed. Arkin finds a girl nailed to a wall just before The Collector enters and slits her throat. Elena is able to find a window with two homeless people outside warming themselves at a barrel fire, but they are too far away to hear her. The assault team finds Arkin and tries knocking him unconscious. While trying to bind Arkin, The Collector uses hooks and pulleys to kill Wally and trap Lisa. Arkin and Lucello escape and find Abby, who claims she can lead them to Elena. Lucello hears Lisa screaming. He traces the sounds to a speaker rigged on Lin’s body and narrowly escapes a series of explosions. The group catches up to Elena and frees Lisa. Elena warns them about Abby, but they go on with her anyway. At the window Elena found earlier, Arkin uses Lucello’s gun to shoot one of the homeless men. When the police arrive, he fires another shot at the authorities so that SWAT will assemble and storm the building.

Abby padlocks everyone inside the room, including herself. She starts running but is killed by an iron maiden. The Collector enters with an assault rifle and two dogs. One dog is shot and the other is stabbed by Arkin. The Collector grabs Elena and leaves. Lucello is caught on the floor. Moving will trigger a trap, so Lisa and Arkin leave him behind. Lisa and Arkin free Elena from her new restraints but a cage falls around the trio. Arkin taunts The Collector. With flammable barrels surrounding the room, The Collector lights a fuse, pours gasoline, and leaves to burn down the rest of the hotel. Arkin intentionally breaks his arm again so that he can bend it and reach the lock on the cage door. The trio escapes to the lab while the building starts burning. Arkin and The Collector fight and Lisa is stabbed in the process. Lucello suddenly enters and fights with The Collector. Lucello is also stabbed. Elena makes it to the door while Arkin fights The Collector again. Arkin is stabbed through both cheeks. He eventually pushes The Collector down the body part chute and sets him on fire. Arkin is trapped by fire, but Elena breaks the skeleton containers and the fluid extinguishes a pathway. Firemen powersaw through the door and rescue Arkin and Elena. Elena is reunited with her father. Arkin looks through the trunks recovered from the burning hotel and finds The Collector’s smoldering mask inside one of them.

Arkin uses the insect collection seen in the hotel to trace entomologists in the area and tracks down The Collector. He sneaks into The Collector’s home and traps the killer in a trunk at gunpoint.

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Review:

The fastest way to review this movie is to show the posters for “The Collector” and “The Collection” side-by-side.  Even they know that the sequel is just more of the same.  Except bluer.

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NOTE: There must have been an issue with the original poster (below) that probably necessitated a quick fix from the Marketing team’s Art Department.  But still…

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     The top row of screenshots is from "The Collector."  The bottom row is from "The Collection."

“Saw” and “The Collector/Collection” have always had an incestuous relationship.  “The Collector” (review here) was once briefly considered for reworking as a Jigsaw origin story.  The screenplay for “The Collector” also helped writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan land the scriptwriting job on Saw IV-VII.  The two franchises even share more than their traps and tone.  Now they are sharing crew lists, too.

Like the first film, “The Collection” does not make much effort to step out of the Saw series’ shadow.  In addition to his work here, composer Charlie Clouser wrote the music for all seven Saw films, which includes the memorable “Hello Zepp” theme.  And “The Collection” editor Kevin Greutert pulled similar duty on the first five Saw films before directing the last two.  There is nothing unusual about crewing up with people you know, and I’m sure Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan were already familiar with these men from their mutual work on the Saw franchise.  But by hiring two men largely responsible for the pacing and sound of the Saw movies, you are not going to move too far away from the criticism of being a clone.

The main premise of “The Collection” is that instead of the killer stalking his victims, an assault team tasked to find a missing girl turns the tables by stalking the killer.  That could have been an interesting approach, except that it never fully follows through.  The assault team becomes trapped in The Collector’s lair almost immediately and then has to find and fight their way out.  There is no difference between that setup and one in which The Collector had laid out traps in a building they already knew.

“The Collection” then starts throwing out new ideas before subsequently throwing them away.  Early on it is revealed that The Collector has been frying the brains of several victims and turning them into rabid creatures not unlike the infected in “28 Days Later.”  After the first horde of these mutations is promptly dispatched, they never appear again for the remainder of the film.  The kidnapped girl at the center of the search befriends another victim who looks to have been cast in some weird fantasy scenario for The Collector.  This girl cryptically alludes to some kind of test or game being played (shades of Jigsaw), but it never materializes into anything more than a routine cat-and-mouse chase.

What are these tossed out ideas replaced with?  Rehashes of things already seen in the first film.

Remember that scene in “The Collector” when the killer sends a dog after Arkin and the girl he is trying to rescue?  The Collector does it again here, except now he sends two dogs.  He also sends them against four people though, and the only reason the dogs live longer than five seconds is because the scene is in slow motion.

Remember when The Collector put a tape recording of screaming in the dead mother’s hand to act as a lure in the first film?  He does that one again, too.  Technically, I suppose it is different this time since it is actually a speaker and not a tape recorder.  And what’s that?  Are those bear traps?

At least The Collector demonstrates a consistent modus operandi, not to mention a keen economical sense for reusing devices he employed the last time around.  That just does not make for a compelling viewing experience when I end up watching restagings of scenes already shown in the previous installment.

Something that has changed this time around is the portrayal of The Collector, although not for the better.  Juan Fernandez played the murderous mastermind as nimble.  His moves were very deliberate, as they should be for someone who puts that much planning into booby-trapping three complete floors of a home.  Even with Arkin as the unexpected X-factor in his plans, he still had an air of confidence and calculated intensity.  Randall Archer’s version in “The Collection” is much more comfortable going with brute force over a tricky machination.  Not only content with barreling ahead fists first into more than one physical confrontation, The Collector is also not above using an assault rifle to take out victims.  This impression lacks the finesse displayed in the original.

The rest of this review can be cut-and-pasted from my review of “The Collector” (just like the poster).  Character development is limited exclusively to extremely brief moments, which is not surprising when considering that the end credits begin rolling only 75 minutes after the movie’s start.  This calls attention to the notion that like its predecessor, story exists only to move things as fast as possible from one kill scene to the next.

Arkin pleads with his wife to leave town for her own safety, never once mentioning anything about their daughter who featured somewhat prominently in the first film.  Christopher McDonald has a pointlessly brief role (more like a cameo) as the father of the missing girl at the center of the plot.  An end scene intended to be emotional has no weight because he had too little screen time for the audience to even care about his character.

The script for “The Collection” is mostly a framework to give FX artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe and the Production Designer a creative outlet for interesting setpieces and splattery death scenes.  Watching an entire dance floor of raving teenagers explode into crimson mist as a threshing machine grinds every last one of them will keep your eyes on the screen (or make you turn away if you are squeamish for that sort of thing).  It is the film equivalent of a Milky Way bar or a Coca-Cola.  Somewhat enjoyable as a guilty indulgence, but really just empty calories with no nutritional value.  Without the gory eye candy, there is nothing fleshing out the movie’s bones.  If “The Collector” failed to make an impact, you can safely skip “The Collection” and not notice a difference in your horror movie-watching life.

Review Score:  35

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