Movie Review: The Collection

If you’re looking for a lovely time out with your family, you have to look elsewhere, but if you’re looking for new, sadistic ways to torture and kill someone you hate, then The Collection is the one stop guide for you.

Written and directed by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the duo responsible for the Saw sequels, The Collection is 80 minutes of blood, gore, cheap thrills, jarring noise and cuss words – just the sort of thing to enjoy if you’re tired of boring romantic comedies. There are bear traps, electrocution wires, lobotomies and many more objects of pain and suffering in the film to make the viewing as brutal as possible. The torture porn genre was invented back in the 80’s and was brought to the mainstream by Eli Roth with Hostel, and thanks to the Saw franchise and now The Collection the genre continues to invade your living room.

The film is actually a sequel to 2009’s The Collector and picks up immediately where the previous movie left off. The original was realized by Melton and Dunstan as a prequel to Saw but decided to turn it into an altogether different low budget franchise, and it seems to have worked. The plot of the first film was moderately thrilling – a burglar (Josh Stewart) who sneaks into a mansion at night is surprised and abducted by a psychotic killer who has already broken into the house. In The Collection the masked killer snares a young girl from a night club as the burglar from the first film escapes and leads a black ops team to catch the madman and rescue the girl. Sadly our armed heroes fail to estimate the lunacy level of the killer and walk into a massive trap that has them being maimed in various gruesome ways. Think of a low budget video game version of Saw and you have the remainder of the plot details of this movie.

Aside from the ghastly torture techniques and the even more painful acting on display, The Collection features plenty of terrible editing and hilariously bad characterization to make it a worthwhile B-movie. Melton and Dunstan run all traces of common sense and logic into the killer’s shredding machine, and it’s only a matter of time until we get a third movie. In case brainless gore is your quick fix for the day then this is admittedly a fun recco.  

(First published in MiD Day)