I remembered watching The Collector, but I keep getting it mixed up with Laid to Rest/Chromeskull. Both involve masked killers, elaborate, brutal traps, and are based loosely on Halloween/Friday the 13th, and to a lesser extent, Saw. We don't learn much of anything about the villain's motivations. This wouldn't be much of an issue, since most horror movies handle that material by letting the audience fill in the blanks by showing some creepy habits. Here, the problem is that his creepy habits are all over the place. He's dressing one captive up like a little girl, he's assembling bizarre mutilated mannequins, he removes some body parts. Some people, he's drugging up and turning into strange manic zombies. Sometimes it seems like he might be making an effort to assemble a perfect being (a la Frankenstein or May) but sometimes he just seems to want to cut people.
This movie did start with a sequence at a rave, which I now consider to be one of the tackiest ways of trying to identify with the youth market. Sometimes, these types of scenes have a place, but this seemed a little silly. At least this sequence comes to a pretty abrupt closing by killing nearly everyone there.
The violence, and the traps, are really over the top. At first, it seemed like it was a little interesting, like it was showing a killer who had a specific plan in mind. As the movie wears on, it doesn't play as well, only because it starts seeming like too much of a plot convenience.
They used a very Halloween-like ending, which seemed appropriate. Unmasking the villain wouldn't work, because we don't have a supporting cast that he can be tied to.
Still, this was reasonably good for a modern horror movie. I can't complain.
No comments:
Post a Comment