The Collector, directed and co-written by the writer of the last three collectively execrable Saw movies Marcus Dunstan, seems perfectly poised to simultaneously tickle the fancy of devoted horror nuts while at the same time disappointing anyone that considers themselves a casual fan. The details it gets more right than wrong, but the broad strokes - the parts that are hard for non-diehards to swallow - stick in the throat like a dry-swallowed Aspirin.

Safe-cracker and erstwhile nice-guy Arkin (Josh Stewart) sneaks into a house he thinks empty, looking for a gem he can sell to get his wife out of loan-shark trouble. Little does he know that the house isn’t empty: the family is still home, caught in the clutches of the silent, masked Collector, a cunning, cruel mastermind who for reasons unknown kills those he sees as not fit to collect in his big red box. The Collector has filled the house with all manner of sadistic, cruel booby-traps, which Arkin must navigate in a high-tension game of cat-and-mouse as he tries to rescue the family and escape with his life… and the gem.

The character of the Collector is really well executed, legitimately scary, pushing all of the right masked-bad-guy buttons. It’s a fine calibration, harder to hit than you’d think, finding a balance for the look of a baddie like this: too over the top weird and you have the clown from Saw, too plain and you miss out on the abstract chilling blankness that a Michael Myers with his inverted Captain Kirk mask can achieve. The makers of The Collecter managed to get their bad guy right. His mask is a functional wool lace-up but weirdly molded, contorted and cruel. His eyes glint and reflect light like a dog's. He’s got a belt full of throwing knives which is ok a little ridiculous, and the only other feature that marks him out is a janitor’s ring of keys on his belt.

Josh Stewart as Arkin is great as well, underplaying things as much as he can in a movie where he’s constantly getting sliced, punched and stalked through a dark suburban hell hole. There are scenes that are as good as anything in the gore-horror genre, moments of exquisite, twisted tension… followed by moments of utter, rank stupidity. Why, exactly, has this dude filled this house with bear traps and razor wire when he’s got the whole family chained up? When did he find the time? The Collector’s murder kit has got to be freakin huge. Why has he taped cheap steak knives to a chandelier? What is his plan? What is… going on here exactly? All of the flavour, the traps and spikes and locked doors that help make the film tense when it works also load it up with a bunch of unexplainable silliness, and when the film doesn’t quite work because of that, it seems like not much more than a boring excuse to show more and more carnage and gore.

For fans of the genre, people whose mental suspend-disbelief button has got a groove worn in it, for those for whom it’s become an autonomic function, the film offers all the great, gory, grisly just-right details in a package that yeah well maybe it doesn’t make sense, but who cares it’s a movie. For everyone else though, its core silliness stands to make The Collector little more than another in a long, ugly line of unoriginal, gory horror-torture films.

6/10