Collecting Dust

Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the writers of Saw 4, 5, and 6 (aka the ones that stopped being relevant), have brought us another entry in the torture porn genre. Dunstan also directed the piece which toys with being a solid movie before it succumbs to its various flaws.
The film opens with a very brief set up as a couple returns home to find a box in their bedroom. When the box moves, the husband gets to be the token “Don’t do that” guy and opens it. After the appearance of the Collector, Dunstan cops a page from Fincher’s playbook in Seven and splices shots of his villain with industrial music. Jerome Dillon provides the original music for the film which is effective in small doses but feels gratuitous in scenes where people are walking/running through a house (Honey, did you leave the Nine Inch Nails Pandora station running again?). Dillon actually did the stereo mixing for a NIN video, so that gives you an idea of what to expect.

After the opening scenes, the movie works fairly quickly towards its premise. Josh Stewart plays Arkin, a handyman whose wife apparently made some poor life choices and is in debt to loan sharks. Forced to come up with the money to save his family, Arkin, who is conveniently a former jewel thief, decides to rob the house of a family whose home he just worked on.
The family deserves to be robbed of course because they are rich. And rich people suck. Dunstan doesn’t try very hard to make us like or dislike the family before we’re treated to an hour of them being tortured. Instead, he divides the family neatly into two distinct sections: family members we want to see cut open and ones we don’t. There is the husband who is generous with Arkin and the beautifully innocent Aryan child that is too young or cute to be gutted like a fish. In the see-you-later group, we have the older daughter who (gasp!) smokes and the jaded mother who (double gasp!) uses Botox. Outside of the oldest daughter Jill (Madeline Zima), who has as many dimensions as a piece of looseleaf, each member of the family turns in an effective performance as individuals whose sense of domestic tranquility is shattered.
Shortly after Stewart breaks into the home, he finds that there is another intruder in the house, and what follows is a suspenseful cat-and-well-cat game as Arkin and the Collector move from room to room. Dunstan does a fine job of making the mansion feel claustrophobic, and he ratchets up the tension as the Collector begins his work with Arkin scurrying around the edges.
A brief side note: Yes, it seems odd that the Collector can set up his devices so quickly (Ten bear traps? Really?), but in a genre where men wearing hockey masks don’t die and horribly burnt individuals wearing knives attached to their gloves kill you IN YOUR DREAMS, you should probably check your sense of reason at the door.

At the heart of the film is a philosophical choice. Arkin must choose between the selfish cost-benefits analysis that is utilitarianism and get the heck out of Dodge and the foolhardy bravery that is altruism. The Collector, on the other hand, represents the force of nihilism. There is only meaningless death and nothingness in his world. Arkin sticks around to be the hero which is less of a shock, but oddly, he seems to be responsible for almost as many bodies as the Collector as he fails fairly miserably at freeing the family.

Josh Stewart, as Arkin, is one of the biggest surprises in the film. For once, we have a likeable horror movie lead who can act. When Stewart sees an open window and struggles to make the right decision, actual fate seems to hang in the balance. When razors chomp down on his hand, the audience feels it, and when he outsmarts the Collector, we cheer him.

Opposite Stewart is Juan Fernández who plays the Collector (Fun fact that will probably tickle no one’s biscuits but mine: Fernández was one of the main villains in Crocodile Dundee II.). The physical interaction between the two is interesting and keeps much of the movie afloat, but there is one glaring problem. The Collector is boring. We aren’t given much of reason as to why he does the horrible things that he does which is ok, but we also aren’t given much of a personality and therein lies the flaw. Jigsaw sets better traps, and Michael Myers has a better mask.

In one particular scene all of the pieces try and come together only to be undone by hasty directing. The oldest daughter of the family returns home with her suitably sketchy boyfriend to make whoopee in what they believe to be an abandoned house. As they sneak into the house and start getting busy in the kitchen, the Collector looks on in rapt amazement, wondering which trap the lustful couple will set off. The audience then experiences a jarring shift in perspective. Looking on with the Collector and eagerly anticipating the same outcome that he does, we find ourselves in uncomfortable shoes. Unsure what to do with this buildup of tension, Dunstan bizarrely has the daughter notice the Collector who abruptly forces each of the characters into the traps himself. It’s this type of impatience with allowing scenes or characters to develop that plagues the film.

What ultimately destroys the film is its niche within the horror movie genre— torture porn. Never has a genre of film been a more fun topic for discussion over Thanksgiving dinner. It combines the revolting nature of torture with the joyless, formulaic titillation of pornography! Why is it that we will pay ten dollars to watch people not just die but suffer in the worst of all possible ways? Morbid curiosity? The American sense of one-upmanship and how- can-we-top-thatness? An underlying sociopathic craving that needs to be filled? None of the answers prove to be optimistic ones. If torture porn films can lend anything to the world, it should be that they end the debate about Guantanamo. Torture is just plain ugly.

Sadly, torture porn films don’t seem to be as quick as the flash in the pan critics have predicted. Horror directors have as of late turned to a disturbing degree towards instigating shudders of revulsion rather than plucking the sublime strings of fear. Walking out of Hostel a few years ago, I remember vividly feeling the weight of what I had just seen. The film wallowed in supposedly stylized ugliness. I was never particularly scared while watching the film as I was sickened.
This line between horror and disgust has largely been disintegrating within the context of modern horror films. The best horror films usually take one of two paths. They either revel in camp, encouraging their audiences to laugh even as they cringe (90% of films made in the 80s and early 90s), or they uncover something darker about ourselves—whether it is our mindless consumption (Dawn of the Dead), the fact that we can be as horrific as any monster (28 Days Later), or the notion that teenagers make horrible camp counselors (Friday the 13th Series). Scream then made it ok for the audience to know and understand the rules of horror films and opened the door to all sorts of postmodernist self-referentiality, but torture porn directors have tried to create new rules that aren’t particularly interesting. Horror should revolve around fear and not revulsion.

The Collector could be read in several interesting ways. Perhaps it is the philosophical struggle about what to risk in the face of evil. Perhaps it is that the huge houses that Americans live in can so easily become our prisons. The huge projector screens and giant chandeliers that we furnish these homes can be our death traps. The his-and-her sinks and granite countertops that people in House Hunters MUST have can be our graves. Eventually, the movie casts those ideas to the side, and instead the audience is treated to fish hooks piercing skin, people’s teeth being pulled out, mouths being sewn shut, and cockroaches eating through skin. Sigh.

The movie also features a bizarre moment of latent homophobia. As Arkin is tortured in the basement, the Collector begins to move towards the hiding place of the token innocent child in the movie, and Arkin tries to distract him to no avail. Until that is, Arkin calls him a “faggot.” Upon the first mention of the word, the Collector pauses and seems perturbed. Arkin then repeatedly calls the Collector a faggot until he ignores the little girl and goes back to Arkin. Call me a serial killer if you must, a severely deranged sociopathic asshole nutball, but no homo thank you. So being called gay is the villain’s weak spot? Really?

The movie loses all hope of being worth a second glance with a shockingly poor and obvious final act that sets the audience up for a sequel that no one wants to see. Horror sequels are the norm because capitalism is beautiful, and audiences don’t really care that they are spoonfed the same garbage (and as someone who has seen every Halloween and Saw film, I can say trash tastes yummy!). We don’t even have to add numbers to sequels any more. We can just add indefinite articles. Hmmmm, what would make a good sequel to Fast & Furious? THE Fast and THE Furious! That must have been an easy day at the office.

What writers and directors need to realize is that audiences demand sequels for characters that they actually want to see again. Whether it is Michael Myers stoic brutality, Jason’s campy ridiculousness, Freddy’s corny puns, or Leatherface’s subtle sensitivity (yes, I did just type that), we respond viscerally to these characters that we root for almost as much as we do the heroes/heroines in the films. And sometimes, yes, we root for them more. The Collector possesses none of these gifts, and as a forgettable addition to the canon of horror movie monsters, he doesn’t need nor deserve a sequel. Perhaps one day, directors will realize that the truly shocking ending would be one that provides closure. Now THAT is a scary thought.