The Collector returns to slice and dice quite a few people in this very entertaining follow up to his 2010 outing in the eponymous named prequel. I first watched the original a couple years ago on HBO and thought it was a cool premise, but thought it’d just be a one shot. Thankfully, I was wrong, and thus we get The Collection! The film picks up where the first left off with our anti-hero thief Arkin (Josh Stewart) being kidnapped by the Collector. After making his escape during a rather brutal opening sequence in which an entire club full of people is laid to waste, he is targeted by mercenaries hired to take the Collector down!
The movie is a bit silly and contrived at times, but whatever, I enjoyed it. The tension once they get into the Collectors nest is palpable throughout the duration of the film. The place is rigged with death traps and the abode establishes enough of the Collector’s pathology to make him interesting without over explaining everything. Character actor Juan Fernandez is replaced as the lead villain by stuntman Randall Archer. Archer does a very good job especially considering the communication of the character is imbued singularly through body language. He cuts an impressive swath throughout the proceedings but I quite liked the idea of a Latino slasher as presented in the original but I can get on board with this.
Everyone else does a pretty good job for a slasher flick, you get about what you expect with it. Veteran character actor Lee Tergesen is the leader of the mercenary group who has his own heart-string pulling reason for doing what he does, and kicks the Collector’s ass a bit in the process. Everyone else is pretty much there to go splat and serve their purpose admirably.
The violence is completely over the top and awesome, as you’d expect from a Saw flick, but it doesn’t suffer from the poor editing and disjointed narrative in which those sequels began to, which is odd because the people who created them(Marcus Dunstan, who also did the Feast trilogy, and Patrick Melton) are the ones responsible for this which leads me to believe they learned from their mistakes.
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