It’s taken a long time to get here, but Marcus Dunstan and
Patrick Melton have re-teamed for the imaginatively titled, The Collection, a
belated follow up to the surprise horror hit, The Collector. Starring Josh
Stewart (The Collector, The Dark Knight Rises), Emma Fitzpatrick (The Social
Network) and Christopher McDonald (Boardwalk Empire), The Collection picks up
where part one left off.
Arkin is locked inside a strangely familiar red box when
Elena (Fitzpatrick) finds him, but after barely escaping with his life, he is
forced to return in order to save the girl. Elena and her friends have become
the latest obsession of a crazed killer who collects people in a booby-trapped
house of horrors, and Arkin knows all too well the kind of horrors that await
them. A team of ‘specialists’ move in to wipe out the danger and from here on
in it’s Saw meets Aliens, albeit, on a much smaller scale.
A bloodthirsty opening – glimpsed at in the trailer – gets
the ball rolling, tastefully handled by the writers of Saw IV, V and VI. It’s a
promising start for sure, but cat-killing curiosity loses its spark as soon as
familiarity takes hold. Considering it took almost four years to get here The
Collection feels rushed, almost as though there’s a vastly superior movie
screaming to be heard. The Collector worked well because it took its time to
set up the slaughter, but The Collection has neither the time nor patience for
that.
The booby traps – both brutal and creative in part one –
play next to no part in the second half of the movie, with our ominous villain
preferring to stalk his victims with a trusty blade. It’s Freddy Krueger
without the pantomime, and Dunstan runs out of fresh ideas very quickly,
with The Collection grounding to a halt after 65 uninspiring minutes. A tidy
footnote sets up the prospect of part 3 but it’s hard to imagine anyone will
care. Then again, Saw II ended in much the same way and I still stuck around
for the next five instalments.
Watchable but unremarkable, The Collection fails to deliver
on its promise of gory, thrilling fun. In the time it took to get here Marcus
Dunstan has forgotten what it was that made the first film so memorable.
Creative kills are replaced by regurgitated stalk and slash, and genuine suspense
is dispensed with altogether. Kind of makes you wish you could crawl inside the
box yourself. AW
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