What's the worst thing in the world? The magma-lamprey that lives in the Earth's core and is going to swallow us all in 2012.
The other worst thing in the world is movies that copy other movies when they obviously have no idea why they're copying them in the first place. It's like getting a root canal because all the cool kids have festering cavities. Well you know what? If we always followed that instinct, we'd still be having fistfights with T-Rexes and combing our beards with tiger bones. Not nicely carved bones, either, but like whole femurs, and you try telling a girl her breechclout makes her look thin when you have to speak around a tiger skeleton.
Can't be done. That's why there was all that head-clubbing. I'm in the mood to crack some skulls right now myself, but that's less about my well-chronicled girl troubles (since when were you supposed to pay in advance?) and more about The Collector, a stupid ripoff of a lot of things that were stupid enough to begin with.
Home security installer Josh Stewart has been setting up jeweler Michael Reilly Burke's system for a while now, but he's got another motive: stealing the giant gemstone in Burke's home safe.
When Burke is scheduled for a family vacation, Stewart heads in — only to find a killer has captured the family and is busy torturing them to death. Trapped inside the booby-trapped house, he and the killer enter a deadly game of dumbass and dumbass.
The Collector's got a pretty sweet concept: bad man goes into home to do bad things, only to find much badder man is already there doing much worse things. Everybody enjoys seeing the predator become the prey. That's why it's so much fun to drop kittens into pits full of badgers.
Director Marcus Dunstan sets out to ruin that potential as swiftly as possible. Opening with what can only be the rejected bits of a Nine Inch Nails video, he then robs the Saw franchise wholesale to provide us with a poorly motivated lunatic who brutalizes people with ludicrously elaborate improvised contraptions, like if Thomas Edison got beat up a lot as a kid while all the girls laughed at him. For good measure, there's some Hellraiser-style torture thrown in, too, because you can never have enough of the second-worst horror franchise in cinema history.
Turns out Dunstan wrote Saw IV-VI with his co-writer here, Patrick Melton, which raises the question of whether it's really stealing when you're stealing from yourself. I'm going to go ahead and say yes, if only on the fleeting chance they'll both be arrested for intellectual theft and locked away in intellectual jail, where for obvious reasons none of the brain-gangs will accept them and will instead spend the duration of their sentence forced to perform librettos while wearing lacy doublets and crotchless hose.
That should give them plenty of time to think about what they've done in dragging out one more gimmicky and utterly shallow psychopath who's more the Platonic embodiment of killing people with knife-loaded chandeliers than he is in any way a believable character.
As if that's not enough, every scene is smotheringly overdirected, filled with slow-mo and drowned out with musical cues, which was probably necessary to make us believe all these idiots could rattle around the house without hearing each other in the first 90 seconds.
There already were several scenes where I had no idea why anything was happening. I still have no clue what the Collector even does. The nonstop use of music instead of actual sound only makes the plot harder to follow. Considering how simple the story is, that's just disgraceful. Confused, derivative, and full of holes, The Collector is like a worse sequel to a movie that was too awful to get made in the first place.
Grade: D-