Oh, Saw, you ridiculous, dumb, misogynistic trailblazer. Having refined and popularized the "torture porn" corner of the horror genre, you've spawned far too many imitators, and it's gotten tiresome. I mean, how many movies about photogenic young actors getting hacked to pieces in grotesque ways do we really need?
Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton co-wrote some of the Saw films, and they wrote The Collector, too. Dunstan directed it. They obviously felt comfortable staying within this particular niche. The problem is that while the Saw films -- which I'll admit I find personally repellent -- are well-crafted films, The Collector is not. In fact, The Collector is terrible. The Collector should be chained to the floor of a basement and subjected to the tortures from Saw just for ever being made. And then someone should give Dunstan and Melton and good slap.
The script, I've heard, was originally pitched as a sort of prequel to Saw. It concerns a financially desperate ex-con named Arkin (Josh Stewart) who breaks into a house to steal a jewel, then discovers that the owner's family is in the the process of being kidnapped by a nutball in an S&M mask who's rigged up the house with a variety of Saw-like booby-traps. So despite his own worst instincts, Arkin tries to get them all out of the house before they're all disemboweled and whatnot.
It's a brisk, efficient setup, and Dunstan immediately gets to the business of pushing his R rating as far as he can, with grisly, horrible, disturbing, and utterly derivative torture scenarios. That none of it makes any sense (one wonders how was the killer able to set up so much elaborate machinery in so short a time, for example) seems to be beside the point. As is the lack of any discernible plot once Dunstan's done setting the scene. It's all just hack, slash, scare, scream, run ... and it's all bloody stupid.
If all Dunstan and Melton wanted was to spurt blood, crack bones, and make us squirm in our seats, then I guess they succeed in The Collector. But when a movie's so weak that it makes you realize that the first two Saw movies actually had complex plots and characters ... that's a pretty weak slice of torture porn, indeed.