Collector, The

Horror films are hard to pull off. It requires a lot of attention to atmosphere rather than just an orgy of blood and guts. To be truly frightening it actually requires little to no gore at all, say in a genuinely chilling movie like “Silence of the Lambs.” If something only has gore than it can be stomach churning at best and silly at worst, but neither one of those things is scary. There’s a trend recently in film called “torture porn.” These are films that fetish-ize the torture of one person by another with seemingly no purpose. It’s the excess of blood and violence that makes these films little more than a sideshow attraction; people just want to see how extreme the violence will get, constantly testing the limit of what is tolerable. And its not that excessive violence is so terrible, if it can be justified. It can work if there is a story to support featuring it, say in a movie like “Hostel,” but sadly there is no shred of a story to be found in “The Collector.”

“The Collector” is the story of a thief who breaks into a house the same night that a serial killer has decided to torture the family within. He then decides that while he lacks the moral compass to keep from stealing, he cannot let the family die and tries to save them. Nothing about the film is plausible let alone believable. The killer in the film is like a grownup Kevin McAllister, if he had been so traumatized by being left home alone that he became a serial killer. He has booby trapped the whole house in such ridiculous ways including a room full of bear traps and a chandelier adorned with butcher knives, and somehow the thief was able to avoid all this when breaking in but not when getting out. There is never any explanation as to why the killer is doing any of this or what his modus operandi actually is; you never actually find out what exactly he’s collecting. The thief is also so inept that every time he tries to help someone he ends up getting them killed. The whole movie is so preposterous that there is nothing really scary about it at all. There are a lot of disgusting bloody moments, but most of them are pretty lame. There are a few moments that are so ridiculous they are laughable, which is really the only good thing in the movie. Unfortunately there aren’t enough of those moments to make this worth seeing.

The weird thing about these films is that there are real people like this in the world, but not the way they get portrayed on the screen. From BTK to David Parker Ray, there are real people who take pleasure in torturing others. But they are fairly normal looking people, that’s what makes them scary. They aren’t going around booby trapping houses for no apparent reason; they find people, torture them in horrific ways, kill them and then do it all over again. All the while they look like your next door neighbor. In movies like this they are more concerned with style and not substance; they have the blood but not the story. Instead of being anything resembling a movie they are just an excuse to give people something that will bust their gore nut, if you will. The frustrating thing is that it was probably so cheap to make this movie that it will easily make a lot more money than it cost and give Hollywood reason enough to make another one. Don’t give them that chance, save your ten bucks for something else.