Ever had one of those nights when you followed along with your friends’ whimsies and later wished you’d just stayed home like you originally planned?
Elena certainly has. But her tag-along experience doesn’t simply end in eye-rolling embarrassment. Her bad night out is all about head-rolling.
The pretty twentysomething follows her pals into an underground rave that turns into a blood-gushing, screaming massacre as a freakish, masked madman mows the crowd down with a swirling farm combine that swings down from the ceiling.
Elena is the sole survivor. But that doesn’t mean she’s the lucky one. She’s captured, brutally manhandled, locked in a trunk and dragged off to the gruesome killer’s secret lair. It’s an old deserted hotel where the fiend, known as the Collector, butchers his “special” victims and makes all manner of grisly displays out of their severed body parts.
While Elena is desperately wishing she’d skipped the party (to say the very, very least) her father is taking action. He quickly assembles a heavily armed team of mercenaries to track down and rescue his daughter. And among them is one Arkin O’Brien.
Arkin had his own “bad night out” not so long ago that landed him in the Collector’s clutches, was brutalized, but somehow managed to escape. The rescuers believe that with Arkin’s help, Elena can be found and the murderer can be apprehended.
Once the team steps foot in the masked monster’s crumbling maze-like hideout, however, they discover a series of deadly traps designed to turn predators into prey.
Now everybody’s wishing they had just stayed home.
Arkin first decides to venture back into the Collector’s abode because he realizes his wife’s life is being threatened by the killer too. And with time he makes a number of heroic choices as he tries to lash and stab at the villain in an effort to protect other helpless victims. Elena escapes her bonds and tries to help others too, putting her life on the line in one case.
It turns out that Lucello, the leader of the mercenary team, has known Elena since she was a child. In the end he sacrifices his life in an attempt to save hers.
A young woman at the rave is topless and making out with her date. Around her we see scores of men and women in flesh-baring outfits gyrating seductively, kissing and caressing one another on the dance floor.
When we first see Elena, she’s at home dressed in a very brief tank top and panties. Later, braless, she crawls on her hands and knees—giving the camera a view down the front of her shirt. In the crumbling hotel’s rooms and hallways are paintings of distorted and/or extremely fat female nudes.
Sadistic, viscerally realistic bloodletting is really all this movie is about. It has no purpose other than to give viewers a series of intricate and deadly “mouse trap” torture contraptions to wince and caterwaul over as flesh is carved and bones are broken in grievously grisly ways.
In one scene a woman stumbles backward only to have her foot penetrated by sharp spikes that spear up from the floor. Once she’s “nailed” in place, a mechanical device—that’s something of a modernized iron maiden—wraps around the woman, impales her and sends geysers of blood spouting in every direction. In another, a series of tripwires unleash a wire cage that traps a dozen or so people. As they struggle and scream, it slowly compresses and eventually crushes them all into a mash of torn flesh, broken bones and oozing gore.
The various maimings and murders go on and on. We see chunks of skin and muscle cut off victims, ravenous insects tearing into someone’s chest, a man getting his tongue hacked off, another losing his teeth to the blows of a hammer. A heavily scarred and rough-stitched (shirtless) man stumbles to his knees and explodes into chunks thanks to a bomb embedded in his neck. A whirling combine blade slashing dozens of victims’ heads and torsos. A woman dies when her throat is gashed open; it gurgles and she spits blood. A skin mask is stapled over a man’s face. A woman is suspended on a wall by large nails hammered through her arms and legs.
We see various bare body parts—including fully nude female torsos—floating in vats of formaldehyde. We nearly trip over piles of discarded and rotting body parts. Men and women turn into drugged and lurching zombie-like guard dogs. The entrails of a torn-open corpse are seen hanging above it. Trying to get out of a trap, a man snaps his own forearm.
About 40 f-words and a dozen s-words. Several uses each of “a‑‑,” “h‑‑‑,” “b‑‑ch” and “d‑‑n.” God’s name is abused several times. Crude-to-obscene references are made to male and female genitalia. A girl flips her middle finger at someone.
Elena’s father is seen asleep in a chair with a glass of alcohol on the table next to him.
The killer injects a victim with a large needle. It’s later stated that the drug drives people to near madness.
It’s implied that a “good guy” is about to to wreak “true” justice by giving his tormentor a bloody taste of his own medicine.
The Collection is a sequel to a film you’ve likely never heard of: The Collector. It’s a pic directed by a guy who wrote several of the final Saw films. And that’s about all you need to know about it if a friend misguidedly attempts to drag you to see it.
Oh, except for …
The Collection is a pointless, empty contrivance of bloody sadism, devoid of any plot or link to reality. Its girl-gets-grabbed-and-everyone-gets-butchered storyline is absolutely ridiculous and utterly repulsive.
This cinematic meat wagon is gruesome, wretched torture porn, period. It’s cocaine for the violently predisposed. It’s arsenic for the rest of us.
Yeah, maybe you should know that, too.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
