‘The Collection’ nastily efficient chiller
‘Not anyone clamoring for it’
LOS ANGELES, Nov 30, (AP): Not that anyone was exactly clamoring for it, but “The Collection” is a sequel to Marcus Dunstan’s little-seen 2009 horror film “The Collector.” The director and his co-screenwriter Patrick Melton have written four of the “Saw” films, and this similar exercise in gratuitous sadism and gore follows roughly the same template, although with the lack of originality suggested by the redundant title.
But this nastily efficient chiller offers some effective chills along the way, beginning with an early sequence depicting the elaborate massacre of dozens of teens at an underground dance party that features the most fake blood seen onscreen since “The Shining.”
Attending the party is beautiful rich girl Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick), who manages to survive the grisly goingson long enough to open a trunk and rescue Arkin (Josh Stewart), the hapless thief who was the first film’s primary victim. Although he manages to make a daring escape by diving out of a window, she’s taken prisoner by the masked killer (stuntman Randall Archer) who totes her back to his lair.
Unfortunately for the traumatized Arkin, Elena’s father (Christopher
“The Hypnotist” is a heavily narrative film, with the relentless pacing you’d associate with any US thriller, but Hallstrom didn’t necessarily take immediately to the form. He brightened when talking about the improvisation of the family scenes, but put an intonation on the word “plot” that made it sound like an epithet. “Making a film like this, you struggle fighting the cliches and trying to breathe life into characters that don’t have life on the page,” he said, speaking of the story’s two disturbed villains in particular.
“I may not be the guy to do these kind of films,” he finally admitted with a laugh.
But there’s little doubt that “Hypnotist” could broaden Hollywood’s image of him as a heartrending go-to guy.
Looking back over his career, he still referred to 1985’s “My Life as a Dog” McDonald) has hired a crack team of mercenaries to find his little girl. Bursting into his hospital room, they demand that he lead them to the killer, whose location he apparently determined via strategically timed, self-inflicted cuts to his arm.
Led by the father’s right-hand man Lucello (Lee Tergesen), the team ventures into the Collector’s house of horrors located in the “Hotel Argento” (if you don’t get the reference, this isn’t the film for you). There they encounter a series of booby traps — more rudimentary than the Rube Goldberg-style constructions in the “Saw” films, though no less deadly. They’re also forced to contend with many of the Collector’s still-living captives, who have been drugged to the point of brutal mindlessness.
Most of the film’s running time is consumed with this cat-and-mouse game, with the proceedings resembling one of those elaborate haunted house attractions that spring up every Halloween. Needless to say, several of the characters meet their demise in the process, with the timing of their deaths generally keyed to their degree of likeability.
Running a taut 82 minutes, the film as his career peak. (“You should see it!” he urged the younger members of the audience, reminding them it’s a Criterion Collection title.) Hallstrom was harder on other films, like “The Cider House Rules” — pointing out the lavishly emotional score as something he regretted, after his early years of using minimalist music in films like “Dog.”
“The performances are great” in “Cider House Rules,” he said, but “it has a score that unfortunately rings a little bit pushy. That score was beautiful, but just not right for the film, and not the kind of score I probably would have dared to do just two years earlier. You get a little numbed coming to America and spending time here. You go to the movies and the strings are soaring, and they keep soaring when you go to bed and when you go to work the next day. You have no problem adding the strings because you’ve maintains a considerable degree of tension throughout, with a few scenes standing out. Particularly effective is Elena’s encounter with several tarantulas — arachnophobes would be well advised to stay away — and another simple but well-staged sequence involving a flickering light. There’s also a nifty bit involving the re-breaking of an arm to facilitate an escape that provoked an intense audience reaction.
But director Dunstan is clearly mainly interested in ratcheting up the gore content via endless scenes of bodies being dismembered, impaled or blown up that well showcase the talents of the special effects and makeup teams. Production designer Graham “Grace” Walker has also done a terrific job with the sets featuring an array of such spooky sights as mounds of body parts, corpses floating in tanks of water, and horrific paintings that make Francis Bacon’s look wholesome.
Unfortunately, the Collector simply isn’t a very interesting screen villain. Clad in a black mask that reveals only his eyes and mouth, he mainly communicates by heavy breathing. It makes one yearn for the perversely witty chatter of Jigsaw. heard them all around you” — until you live to regret it because you realize the orchestration has helped give you a reputation for tending toward syrup.
“It’s hard to believe looking at my credits now, but I was so afraid of the sentimental,” the director said. “And I still am, believe it or not. Because I’m drawn to that kind of material, but I keep fighting sentimentality. But I’m drawn to sentiment. I keep walking that tightrope walk, and probably I get into the wrong side at times. But I really am just drawn to moving people in a truthful way with performances that ring true, and observations of real human behavior that we can recognize and relate to. All that is the fuel for my engine, why I make movies. And then I end up doing things that now I hear they step into sentimentality-despite the fact that I throw up when I see a movie that pushes the sentimental. So I want to stay away from that.Still.”