Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

The Collector Blu-ray Movie Review

Where are Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar when you really need them?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 22, 2010

William Wyler, the veteran director whose career encompassed several decades and virtually every genre known to film, made only one real horror thriller in his long life, 1965’s chilling The Collector. One of the most disturbing films of its era, The Collector depicted a mild manner butterfly enthusiast (Terence Stamp) who decided to “collect” a pretty young girl (Samantha Eggar) he had fallen in love with, imprisoning her in a secret hideaway in a country mansion he had purchased. The Collector was for the most part a non-gory, even placid, film which erupted only once or twice in abject violence, making those rare moments all the more visceral and frightening, only increasing the horror one felt watching this poor, defenseless woman in a truly nightmarish predicament. How I wished for something akin to Wyler’s restraint as I watched the completely non-related but identically named horror fest The Collector, a film that relishes violence and gore but sacrifices (no pun intended) virtually everything else, including character, plot and, frankly, coherence.

Josh Stewart is Arkin in 'The Collector'.

Don’t get me wrong—there are scares galore in The Collector, but they’re uniformly culled from things like jump cuts, usually with loud low frequency effects augmenting the surprise, and to probably even a greater degree, squirm worthy moments of torture and mayhem that involve things like pinking shears on tongues, fish hooks in eyes, and various other sharp and pointy accoutrements in various body parts. After a brief prologue concerning a suburban couple coming home to a disturbing discovery in their upstairs bedroom, The Collector concerns a carpenter named Arkin (Josh Stewart) whose work on a country mansion masks his real goal, which is stealing a jewel from the owner’s hidden safe, for supposedly noble motives, as he wants to repay his wife’s loan from some nasty thugs. Arkin returns to the home late at night during a rainstorm (of course), to find the home is already inhabited by a madman who has captured the family and is in the process of poking, prodding, and dissecting them, having turned the mansion into one giant set of traps full of knives, clamps, hooks and nails. The rest of the film plays out as a cat and mouse game between Arkin, who is badly injured early in the escapade, and the masked madman, who is not just trying to figure out if there’s someone else running around the home, but is very, very busy torturing the people he’s already captured, as well as trying to find the adorable young daughter of the couple, whom Arkin has had a heart tugging moment with earlier in the film. Are you rolling your eyes yet?

Saw popularized these torture-fests masquerading as film, and indeed this film in its original incarnation as The Midnight Man was evidently pitched as a prequel to that franchise, but by this time even the less jaded members of the audience are so numb to the scenes of cutting, slicing and dicing that it gets harder and harder to elicit a reaction. What we’re left with is a routine slasher flick with absolutely no emotional resonance, and pitifully little to recommend it to anyone other than sadists who get off on watching people die slow, agonizing deaths.

Director Marcus Dunstan knows his stuff, at least as far as this idiom’s shallow ambitions and narrow focus go, staging the chaos with some appealing savoir faire, including some inventive overhead shots that give us simultaneous views of both cat and mouse in a desperate game of hide and seek (and kill). On an emotional level, there’s simply nothing here, despite rather lame attempts to humanize Arkin as a loving father and basically decent guy, despite being a jewel thief and schemer. In fact the dichotomous approach toward this putative hero is one of the stranger decisions made in this film, as it casts the person the audience should be rooting for in a decidedly less than favorable light. I assume we’re supposed to think these rich country folk deserve to be robbed since the wife names her wrinkles after her eldest daughter before Botoxing them into oblivion, but it all rings hollow, leaving nothing to anchor the film in other than blood and guts. Is that really enough? Evidently so for a certain segment of the audience, which has made the Saw franchise, if not this film, a rousing box office success.

Ultimately the film is defeated by its own improbability, which is ironically coupled with about every slasher cliché you’ve ever seen. First of all, what exactly are “the collector”’s motives, and how, really, do his boxed people act, as one of the hapless souls screams three quarters of the way through the flick, as “bait”? Though his identity is more or less revealed toward the end of the film, and is supposedly extremely ironic in a post-hip way, there’s absolutely no reason given for his actions, whether it’s the torturing or, in fact, the collecting itself. And as anyone who knows how these films go can predict, the “final showdown” is really only a prelude to the “final, final showdown” which erupts out of nowhere in a silly way with, again, absolutely no explanation. I don’t want to give too much away for those of you who actually want to see the film, but how exactly does the ambulance crash? Is there a hidden guy wire on the road as well as every room in the house Arkin has managed to make it out of? It’s frankly ridiculous.

The Collector is a routine slice ‘em, dice ‘em outing that will certainly make most audiences gasp in horror, but not for the right reasons. The real horror is that films this desperate continue to get made at all.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Collector's AVC encoded 1080p 2.35:1 image is dark, grimy and grainy, and I'm quite sure that's exactly how director Dunstan wanted it. The Blu-ray looks rather spectacular if you take the post processed images into account. The opening, quasi-hallucinogenic scenes, with pumped contrast and bizarre colors, pop very nicely. The beautiful location shots during the day also boast impressive detail and really sharp clarity. Once we get to the main act, things turn decidedly darker, though black levels are good and contrast remains strong. What may bother some people, especially in the treated shots where it shows more noticeably, is the omnipresent grain. Some of the scenes bathed in green light bring the grain to the forefront in amounts that almost approximate digital noise, but I personally found the effect quite in keeping with the film's unsettling ethos. While this overpowering grain gives at least the illusion of softness some of the time, there's really very sharp detail throughout the film.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

For all the qualms I personally have about The Collector as a film, no one can fault its stupendous sonic design, which arrives on Blu-ray in one of the most robust DTS-HD MA 5.1 mixes in recent memory. From the first moments of the film, where beautifully immersive sylvan crickets are undercut by the ominous rumble of LFE, you know you're in for a rollicking good time with this soundtrack. There's virtually no scene that doesn't include some really fun pan effects as various people are impaled on objects or blades come careening out of nowhere to do their nasty business. The soundtrack is full of source cues, some with spooky Goth pop tunes, but a lot of it with a thumping, bass heavy techno feel that perfectly mirrors the claustrophobic horror of the images. A lot of the central portion of this film plays out with virtually no dialogue, so we're left to listen to the multitude of ambient noises as Arkin makes his way gingerly through the booby-trapped mansion, and the fidelity and range of this DTS mix is right there every step of the way.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras on this Blu are pretty slim, but include an entertaining enough commentary by director Dunstan and co-writer Patrick Melton, three deleted scenes (totalling just a few minutes), a music video of "Beast" by Nico Vega, a sampler of some of the source music used in the film, and the theatrical trailer.

The Collector Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ho-hum, another fish hook in the eye movie. Somewhere along the line filmmakers have got to aim a little higher than eliciting squirms from unseemly footage of body parts being chopped to bits. If you must see only one film in your life called The Collector, make it Wyler's 1965 opus, not this mess.