The Collector: Home Alone meets Saw

I am moving soon and because of this I have been going through my dvd collection and getting rid of things I won't watch again and watching some stuff that I never got around to seeing. Last night, I found The Collector sitting on the shelf, never before been played.

I'll explain a little better. I used to work a third shift job where the average work week was around 50 hours. I say the average because many weeks the employees were hitting 60 hours in five days. During this time I would buy movies, but I didn't have a lot of time to actually watch them. Now I have a bunch of dvd's just sitting around collecting dust. Welcome to the present where I'm going through them.

On to the film...

The Collector is a torture porn horror film from back in 2009. The premise of the movie is simple and not that appealing. But we all know that you don't need a great plot for a horror movie.

The Plot: A guy is working construction at a rich client's house. Later we find out that he has a child and an ex-wife that is in debt to loan sharks. He plans to break into his client's home and rob him to pay off her debt and in doing so prevent her from trying to run away from the shark and taking his daughter with her. The problem with this plan is that someone else has already broken into the house before he got there and set up a bunch of traps. The trap-layer is called the collector because he kidnaps one person from each house, killing the rest, and puts them in a box and then brings that box with him to the next house.

There's the plot. See, simple.

The good and the bad: The traps cause a lot of anguish, on par with the traps from the Saw films. This is probably because this film was intended to be a Saw prequel before the idea was turned down by the studio. We have traps that cause massive hemorrhaging, so they must be unique and awesome right? Wrong. The traps look like they come right out of Home Alone. There's knives put on the chandelier, bear traps filling an entire room and fishing hooks hanging from the ceiling. There are more, but you get the point. It's as if the character Macaulay Culkin plays grew up and decided he was going to kill people via his obsession with the Saw franchise, but he was never any more clever than he was in Home Alone 1.

Despite the idiotic traps and very basic plot, the film is entertaining...if and only if you're into the whole torture porn genre. It was very average for the genre and in comparison to a more thoroughly developed film, it's not up to par. If you take it for what it is, a bloody killing spree, then you'll like it.

There's a sequel supposed to be coming out this year. The sequel is titled The Collection and has Christopher McDonald and Lee Tergesen (Tobias Beecher from HBO's OZ) in the film.