The Collector

Here we go, the first 18 certificate film of my film reviewing career! Except, I'm still 17. So, you'll be happy to know that I actually broke the law to review this film for you. Be proud.

This story is actually quite different to any horror I've seen before. The first scene sets the tone for the film, with a suspicious looking box, man opens it, gets grabbed, screen goes black, the film properly starts. Like many, many other horror films. Arkin, our protagonist, is a construction worker of sorts and he's out along with some bug extermination team to do stuff for an evidently rich family who live in an epic mansion (which seems to shrink when they actually go inside, as inside it just looks like a normal sized house....) and we find out that he and his wife aren't on very good terms, as she has many an issue with Loan Sharks. Arkin needs money to help his wife, so he goes to this big, burly, black guy to help him out. Arkin decides to rob said mansion. Okay, I see where this is going. He goes in, starts unlocking a safe, when he hears some movement in the house - "The family are away for the weekend", he explained with the big, burly, black man. This baffles him, and he soon discovers that there is a murderer in the house! Dun dun dun. Cue lots of extremely tense moments within the house and throw in a fair amount of blood and guts (literally...) for good measure.

That sounds rather sarcastic, giving the impression that I didn't like the film. Whereas I actually quite enjoyed it. I do like a good horror, and this is from the Saw mould admittedly (the guys that wrote this film wrote a couple of the Saw sequels, incidentally), but this is far cleverer than Saw, employing for more scare tactics rather than plain old torture porn. The murderer and our anti-hero come within inches of each other without actually seeing each other thanks to the mansion as it beholds probably about 9 doors for each room. Clever pan shots of the house, where it looks down on two adjacent rooms, Arkin in one, the killer in the other, separated by inches of wall. I found those scenes in particular very well done when it comes to the cinematography point of view.

The acting from Arkin is a stand out, as he is rather excellent I thought, changing from a robber who went in to do one thing and one thing only, dragged into a situation of saving a family from the hellish being that holds them captive. The others are fairly irrelevant as, I'll just tell you the truth, no one in the film lasts very long once in the house, besides Arkin and Hannah, the youngest daughter of the family. One thing that befuddled me was how surprisingly calm Hannah was in this situation. Her Mum and Dad had been caught by this monster of a man, and yet we don't actually see her crying. For a girl around 8 years old, you'd have thought crying would be first on the agenda, but never mind. Oh and lads, there are boobs in this, from the lesbian girl in Heroes, you know, the one that gets with Hayden Panettierre? Yeah, her. Just saying.

All in all, I enjoyed, I don't think the others enjoyed it very much, Ffion for example dreaded walking the 20 feet to her front door in case she got abducted. Like The Strangers, another home-invasion film I utterly adored, this kept be hooked from the get go, but contrasting with The Strangers, this has blood, and lots of it. Bear traps, fish hooks, knives, you name it, it's in this film. The Strangers didn't bother with all that, it went straight for the scariest approach possible - plan and simple terror. This employed a tactic of terror, with some cringe worthy, and on one occasion (I'll let you decide which I'm talking about), genuinely sick-making moments.

I'd give that a 7/10. A good, solid horror flick that's far, far better than the current horror's that grace our cinemas.