For those who had come to dread yet another installment of the Saw series and its ilk — not out of fear, but from boredom at the films’ dull repetition of elaborate torture and murder methods — 2009’s The Collector was a breath of if not fresh, then at least less stagnant air.
Coming from the creators of the latter Saw installments, and originally intended as a prequel (an idea they thankfully ditched), the film did include some of the same grisly spins on Rube Goldberg-inspired slaying. But they’d been couched within a sly and intermittently effective inversion of Home Alone, with a home invader setting the tripwires and booby traps. The film was still a fairly generic gore fest, but it built enough of a cult following to justify the similarly low-budget sequel that its open end demanded.
For the follow-up, writer-director Marcus Dunstan and co-writer Patrick Melton treat their original as if it were their Alien. The first film left their hero Arkin (Josh Stewart) not unlike Ripley in that series, confined in a small space and heading for points unknown. Only in this case, that space is a footlocker instead of a hibernation chamber, and instead of defeating the villain, Arkin has been trapped in that footlocker by The Collector‘s answer to the alien: the unnamed “Collector,” a diabolical, black-masked psycho with a taste for killing whole families and taking one away alive as his trophy.
Following that template, Arkin returns in The Collection, after escaping at the start of the film, to lead a band of mercenaries to the villain’s labyrinthine lair on a rescue mission — again, just as Ripley does in Aliens. Just in case you were in danger of missing the connection, they even include a scene in which Arkin briefs the soldiers on their adversary before maintaining that he’s only there for informational purposes, not to take part in the mission, just as in a nearly identical scene in James Cameron’s film.