I don’t like Torture Porn. A little bit of Torture Porn goes a long way with me. I loved the original SAW, and…that’s about it. In terms of Torture Porn, the SAW franchise has got that covered. I don’t think we need any others. To my mind, Torture Porn is too easy. It’s cheap. You can make an audience squirm with Torture Porn without having to earn it. You can skimp on atmosphere, story, everything else, provided your FX are up to snuff and the actor—sometimes “actor”—being tortured can scream effectively. It’s lowbrow, gimmicky Horror.
All that being said, THE COLLECTOR has been in my queue for quite some time, so I decided to finally give it a watch. I didn’t realize it was Torture Porn until I was well into it. I will say it’s at least an entertaining excursion. There’s some story there and some atmosphere in addition to the gore and the screaming. I think their killer would have been more intimidating if they’d cast a bigger guy in the role; there’s a reason Jason is always played by a big guy (except in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2, wherein Jason was smaller and was not so scary). And I think they should have gone for a better design for the killer’s mask. I digged on the spider eyes, but the basic ski mask look just looks like a guy in a ski mask.