Review of The Collector (2009) by Chads. — 31 Jul 2009

David Fincher's "Zodiac" was about killing... and investigative reporting. Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs" was about killing...and women in the FBI. That's what makes a film like "The Collector" so tedious, it's just about killing(at least Tobe Hooper had hillbillies for local color), and even worse, the aesthetics of killing(at least Wes Craven had Ingmar Bergman's aesthetics to riff off of).

So if you're a purist when it comes to killing, but found the murders in the "Saw" series too baroque, rest assured, this latest entry in the "torture porn" subgenre has traps, just traps, not puzzles.

Thanks for the homage to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, but no thanks, was my reaction to the scene where a cat is murdered, which may be an unfortunate reference to the cat burglars played by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in "To Catch a Thief", who at one point, are in the same house, doing the same job.

"The Collector" updates Hitchcock's atypically breezy film by replacing one of the thieves with a psychopathic killer, a home invader with pitch black pizazz. It's a staycation for Michael(Michael Reilly Burke) and Hannah(Karley Collins), who never did make it to the airport, to the burglar's surprise, nor to the end of the movie, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

Badly bloodied and badly predisposed, the traps aren't for the adults(including Arkin, the unexpected guest); the traps are for the two daughters, because moviegoers love to see bloodied females without their tops or their heartbeats.

As Jill(Madeline Lima) and her boyfriend do what teenagers do best in slasher pics(which is die in the most grisly fashion possible after some form of copulation), the moviegoer realizes that the other daughter, the small girl, could easily have been the one to be impaled on a wall, or be mutilated by bear traps.

The potential for this little girl's violent death is what's ultimately off-putting about "The Collector", a film about killing, plain and simple.