Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2013 July 03 • Wednesday

According to something I read on Wikipedia, the series of Saw movies is "the most profitable horror film franchise of all-time". That hyphen in the last word is as good a reminder as any of Wikipedia's vulnerabilities. The factoid itself is not particularly interesting or surprising.

But I saw the first Saw movie and enjoyed it. Not enough to recommend it or anything—and I've mostly forgotten it—but I was heartened to find that even in this day and age there were horror/shlock/exploitation/whatever filmmakers who were using ingenuity and determination to overcome the limitations of low budgets. The spirit of Herschell Gordon Lewis prevails!

The Saw sequels didn't interest me and most other so-called "torture porn" movies failed to draw me in. Hostel was a complete waste of time and I didn't bother to watch most others. It occurred to me that the subgenre might have its roots in grand guignol and the same Wikipedia article mentioned above agrees with me.

The "spectacle of hurt", to quote Eddie Campbell, seems to be the main event promised by a large percentage of English-language filmmaking these days. ("In the movies, meaning will always be secondary to spectacle, and the favourite spectacle of our miserable age is the spectacle of hurt.") Sex and violence have always been the movies' biggest draw, and Gaspar Noé's Irréversible is surely torture porn as much as any other film is.

Once in a while I find myself really enjoying one of these movies, however. Not Saw so much, though I did really like the Korean movie I Saw the Devil. The latter movie ends up making a genuinely persuasive argument against both the escalation of violence and the enjoyment of violent spectable, in much the same way that Peckinpah hoped The Wild Bunch would.

Recently I watched and enjoyed The Collector, more of a straight-up torture porn movie but one with an actual story and an admirable anti-hero.

Arkin breaks into a wealthy family's house to rob their safe. His wife needs to pay back a loanshark by midnight that night or horrible things will happen to her—and to the young daughter that she and Arkin have. Arkin has been doing work on the house and knows the layout. But when he shows up that night, he finds that a masked psycho has rigged the house with numerous traps and is enjoying himself torturing the parents.

Arkin is working on the safe when he hears the screams coming from the basement. What to do? The victims have a teenage daughter who isn't home and a younger daughter—the same age as Arkin's—who's hiding somewhere in the house.

Arkin's not some superman. But he has enough street smarts, skill and experience to cover the first requirement of a thriller, that it should be a fantasy of competence. (That insight came from somebody writing in the TLS sometime in the last year or two.)

In Dario Argento's Suspiria there's a scene in which a young woman trying to escape from a murderer falls into a room filled with barbed wire. She's trapped painfully and, well, that's the end of the line for her. The Collector is an elaboration on that theme and also connects with the popular old, dark house movies of the 1930s, in which masked killers were always creeping around mansions on stormy nights. They had traps, too.

One reason I might have responded so sympathetically to The Collector is that being hunted by a homicidal maniac in my own house was a recurring nightmare I had when I was a kid. The movie takes this nightmare, makes it into a morality tale and layers on the suspense and gore. (It also taps into the popular fear of dentists in one scene.)

The photography is excellent, with unusually fine colors and textures. I thought it was very well made in general, with an intelligent and creative script that keeps you busy enough not to fret over contrivances and the implausibility of the killer's modus operandi.

It's not for everybody. It's not even for most people I know personally. But it is for a select few and I'll be recommending it to them.