Monday, April 19, 2010

The Collector: Unnecessary Kitty Trauma....

The good news is that I loved Kick-Ass.  Do yourself a favor and go see it!  The bad news is that I did watch The Collector, and while watching it I kept staring at the Netflix envelope and thinking "when will this 1 hour and 28 minutes be over?"

The Collector is a low rent Saw brought to you by the makers of........Saw.  The Director, Marcus Dunston, wrote Saw IV, V, and VI, also known as the "lesser" Saws. 

Josh Stewart, who looks like a young Sean Penn and who was awesome in the short lived TV show "Dirt" plays Arkin, an ex-con who decides to rob a house to help out his insanely hot ex-wife pay off some loan sharks.  I know, already this is boring the shit out of me.  Anyway, he gets to the house, gets in, and just as he is about to open the safe, he hears a noise.  Someone else is in the house.  Arkin hides, and then begins to hear screaming.  It is the family who lives in the house, locked up in the basement.  Seems a serious asshole in a mask is torturing the family.  Arkin picks up the phone to call the police and in an instant he gets a nail through the ear.  This is one of the many elaborate traps the masked asshole, by now known as "the Collector," has set up throughout the house.  Since he has the family tied up, he must of set the traps just in case some ex-con decided to break in at the same time he was playing happy fun torture. 

The traps are pretty nasty.  I kept thinking the whole time that I hoped the "Collector" had drawn some kind of map or diagram to remind himself of everything he had done, because it would suck for him to be killed by his own knife chandelier.  The "Collector" is like the Macgyver of serial killers.  This seems like a lot of work just to kidnap one person (see the Collector only keeps one person, the rest he kills.)  Arkin keeps trying to rescue the family, but since the family are also a bunch of assholes, they keep getting killed.  Even the family cat gets killed.  Well, first the cat gets stuck in some acid, and then kitty guillotined.  My cat Yao was not in the room while this scene took place.  Thank God. 

The Collector does have it's good qualities.  It is beautifully shot, some of the traps are quite interesting, and Cujo makes a guest appearance.  If you really love the Saw films, you will probably love The Collector.  I only mildly like the Saw films so I watched this flick.  What can I say?  I'm a sucker.

As a side note.  I am noticing a weird trend of former child stars (of the girl variety) showing up in horror flicks, usually playing a quasi-slutty girl who more likely than not is going to get killed.  And they also show their boobs.  Saw this with  Zombie's Halloween, saw it with Hatchet, and now The Collector.

Apparently the little girl from The Hand that Rocks the Cradle is hot shit.  All I know is that it was driving me crazy trying to figure out who she was!

1 comment:

the jaded viewer said...

Hahaha good review. Yeah you'd think he'd need a map of all those damn traps. Severe logic problems in this one (I pointed these out in my own review (http://jadedviewer.blogspot.com/2010/04/collector-review.html))

Just a goofy horror flick that was sorta pointless...but I guess that was the point.

Kick Ass rocked!