The Collector (2009)

How about this for a good idea for a horror film: A man walks into a bar… and stumbles into the elaborately booby-trapped lair of a homicidal maniac who likes to torture his victims before slapping them into a shipping trunk. Or this: A woman goes to take a shower… and stumbles into the elaborately booby-trapped lair of a homicidal maniac who likes to torture his victims before slapping them into a shipping trunk. Or this: An ex-con burglarizes a home… and stumbles into the elaborately booby-trapped lair of a homicidal maniac who likes to torture his victims before slapping them into a shipping trunk. That third scenario, as it happens, is the actual plot of 2009’s The Collector, a dim bulb of a horror yarn from Marcus Dunstan, the writer of Saw IV-VII (no kidding). Had Dunstan, or anyone for that matter, stopped even for a nanosecond to question the identity or the motivations of his psycho killer—as well as his reasons for fashioning the custom-made, over-the-head leather mask (replete with drawstrings!) so prominently featured in the film’s advertising campaign when ski masks are so in season—we might have been spared not only this film, but its unnecessary sequel three years later. It all makes next to no sense, and even the torture porn element is murky and uncreative. Clearly whatever “ideas” are on display here—hot glue on a bedroom floor, razorblades on the underside of sash windows, tripwires with falling knives and swinging machetes—are outtakes from some Saw script that never saw the light of day (or, heaven forbid, has yet to be made). And as for the “collector of people” angle, that’s about as underdeveloped as a washed-out Polaroid of a premature baby. Dunstan might just as easily have called his film Saw VIII: The Leftovers, slapped it into a trunk and been done with it.