Metacritic-Rezensionen

With both feet planted firmly on the sticky accelerator of the torture-porn vehicle, The Collector is a surprisingly stylish and confident high-concept thriller.

Either you go for this sort of extreme, senseless gore or you don't. With its plot and lead performance, The Collector is, at least, an unusual specimen.

Making his directorial debut, Dunstan displays a knack for building suspense. And yet, weirdly, amidst all the requisite blood spray, one senses a reluctance on the filmmaker’s part to linger lovingly over the pierced skins and protruding entrails of the killer’s various victims.

For his directorial debut, The Collector, Dunstan streamlines the "Saw" concept slightly by silencing the killer and focusing more intently on a house that’s been converted into a jury-rigged deathtrap.

The Collector feels like the final, welcome nail in the bizarrely popular torture-porn coffin.

As the seconds tick down to midnight, Arkin becomes a reluctant hero trapped by a masked Collector in a maze of lethal invention--the Spanish Inquisition as imagined by Rube Goldberg--while trying to rescue the very family he came to rob.

The result is a sub-"Saw" knockoff that manages to be brutal yet monotonous, not to mention monstrously unpleasant.

In the absence of a sturdy, plausible foundation on which to hook all those grisly bits, the film, originally a Dimension release, tends to play out more like a protracted "Saw" outtake reel.

Offers agony in a vacuum, a villain without a motive and a hero with more personal problems than lines of dialogue.

Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.