THE COLLECTOR tries mix Saw with Home Alone. How does it fair? Read this here review to find out.

Release date: 25 June 2010
Directed by: Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton
Starring: Josh Stewart, Michael Reilly Burke, Juan Fernández
Cert: 18




The pre-title sequence of the Collector is text book horror. The opening shot stalks a nice suburban house as a middle-aged couple arrive home from a night out. Then we pop inside as she goes upstairs to “get ready” for bed. He’ll be “up in a minute”. First he has to potter around unplugging all of the appliances downstairs, the sexy beast. This 40-something foreplay comes to an end rather abruptly when he hears her screaming. When he arrives to investigate why she’s screaming she points to a big box in the middle of the floor. The box bumps, the whole audience jumps, yer man does something stupid, a thing happens and the opening credits roll. Not the most groundbreaking opening ever, but that one good jump provides a sense of promise.

When the end credits roll however you may feel cheated by that promise, like when you make a new friend and think that they’re great until you realise that they’re only so much fun because they have an amphetemine addiction.

The Collector is from the makers of Saw IV, V & VI. It would appear that they walked into a boardroom and said “Think Macaully Culkin meets Jigsaw from the Saw movies”. Then, instead of being asked if there was any narrative or interesting characters, the men who owned the boardroom said something along the lines of “Here is some money. Bring us back a movie”.

The Home Alone/Saw concept is plonked onto the story of Arkin (Josh Stewart). Arkin is a handyman working at a big house which his supervisor reminds him is “in the middle of nowhere”. The mother of Arkin’s young daughter is in some financial difficulty with some shady types, and he has a special talent which he plans to use to whip up some dough. He only has until midnight to get it though, because that’s how these things work. It’s a cheap trick designed to build suspense, and it doesn’t really work because it’s silly.

The Saw movies have revolutionised the slasher/horror genre. They did this by removing the anonymity of the killer’s victims. When Saw’s killer tortures someone to death, the audience is given a brief history of why that person deserves to die. Unfortunately the lads have abandoned the intricacies of their Saw movies. They’ve just carried over the idiocinratic torture and ignored the rest. The slasher here is a voiceless, masked lumberjack dressed in black, with seemingly no motive. What is he hurting those people for, and why should I care? Oh, he’s just insane. Freddie had a motive. Jason had a motive. This guy is just a prick.

No effort went into the writing of the family of the manor either. The father is a doctor with a short temper but a tinge sentimentalityness, the mother is vain but dedicated to family time, the eldest daught is a sexed up teen rebel (played by the little girl from 90s sit-com The Nanny, who has developed nicely) and the youngest daughter likes pretend tea parties and thinks she’s a mermaid. Why is the eldest child never on mid-term break from clown college?

There are so many clichés throughout this movie that you will find yourself questioning if you have seen it before. Is he really going to into the basement? Yes. Yes he is.

The ending is completely truncated in the same underwritten fashion of the rest of the movie. It’s as if they’re setting up for a sequel, which makes no sense at all. They couldn’t be arsed writing the first movie, why are they setting up a second one?

Hopefully, the makers of The Collectors will be promptly shown the door walk into that boardroom again and say “Remember the Macaully Culkin/Saw film we made? We’ve a great idea for the sequel.”