The Collection (film)


The Collection is a 2012 American psychological slasher film and sequel to the 2009 film, The Collector. The film stars Randall Archer, Emma Fitzpatrick, Christopher McDonald, Lee Tergesen, and Josh Stewart, who reprises his role from the first film as Arkin. It is written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, directed by Dunstan, and was released on November 30, 2012.

Plot

In the past- Mr. Peters tells his daughter, a young Elena, about the darkest days of the Collector's past before the events of first film. Suddenly, a truck hits their car and the two of them get injured, but neither dies. A strange man appears to break the car's window and saves the young girl.
Years after the events of the first film, teenager Elena Peters and her friends, Missy and Josh, go to a party. Elena witnesses her boyfriend, Brian, with another woman. She leaves the dance floor and enters an isolated room. In the room, Elena finds a box which Arkin is enclosed in. Elena carefully opens the latches then Arkin pushes open the box and pulls Elena down, as a steel spear suddenly impacts. Elena, never impaled, sets off the Collector's massive death trap by hitting a switch and a massive razor saw blade begins killing half of party people including Josh and the DJ. Elena, now retrieves the key to rescue Arkin, allowing them to leave the room. Amidst the bloody killings of the Collector's victims, Brian tries to escape while a machete trap slices their throats. Elena watches in horror then proceeds to help Missy, the last of the survivors, as they are trapped and are about to be crushed by an elevator. Elena makes them help in an attempt to turn off the elevator door. The Collector finally arrives and kills the remaining of the last survivors by crunching them into corpses as Elena cries. Arkin has released himself and makes way to a window and escapes by grabbing Brian's corpse to break the window over the club. The Collector appears and kidnaps Elena, while Arkin escapes by jumping out of a window, landing on a car and breaking his arm in the process.
Arkin is later taken to the hospital, where he is arrested by the police and put under constant surveillance due to his own criminal record. After suffering nightmares of his torture from the Collector, he is approached by Lucello, an employee of Elena's wealthy father, who has hired a team of mercenaries to hunt the Collector down and save Elena. Lucello implies that if Arkin leads them to the Collector's hideout, he will expunge Arkin's record. Arkin leads the mercenary group to the Collector's base, an abandoned hotel. Meanwhile, Elena witnesses a man being tortured before escaping from the trunk. Upon the team's arrival, Arkin refuses to go inside, but Lucello forces him at gunpoint to guide them through the hotel. The Collector reenters the room and notices Elena has escaped before being alerted to the team's presence.
Upon entering the hotel, the team is attacked by various people who the Collector has captured and driven insane with drugs, forcing the team to shoot them. One member of the team named Lin is immediately stabbed and killed by the Collector. Arkin takes the opportunity to escape from Lucello. Elena discovers another trunk and opens it. A seemingly innocent girl named Abby steps out, pleading to Elena for help before following her through the hotel to look for a way out. Meanwhile, Lucello's team and Arkin discover an unknown man, who cries and repeats that he “didn’t make it,” moving closer to the team. When asked what he means, he looks up, suddenly no longer crying. He answers simply, “The Collection..” before baring his teeth and screaming at Lucello and his team, “and neither will you!!” Suddenly, the man’s head erupts, spraying the team with blood. A man named Dre is then speared by a trap and dies. While wandering the hotel in separate groups, Arkin, Elena, and Lucello's team all encounter live humans being experimented on and human body parts rearranged to resemble insects, which are displayed in glass cases. Lucello and his team find Arkin and attempt to detain him. Arkin spots the Collector above on a walkway, preparing to throw a hook down at the team. They ignore his attempts to warn them, and Wally, a member of the team, is killed by the hook. Other members of Lucello's team are killed or captured. Elena is discovered to have a hearing aid by Abby, who claims to be the Collector's "favorite" and is reluctant to break his rules. Abby screams that Elena is “at a disadvantage” because of her hearing aid, and will “never win.” The two are then separated when the Collector finds them.
Later, Elena and Lucello reunite, rescue Paz, and find Abby, who asks to escape with them. Elena, remembering Abby’s earlier outburst, pleads with Lucello not to trust her. Abby then sabotages their efforts of escaping, before being killed when Paz punches her and causes her to trip into one of the Collector’s traps. The Collector finds them, thanks to Abby’s screams, and seems enraged upon seeing her body inside one of his traps. He grabs Elena and escapes deeper into the building with her.
As police converge at the hotel, the lights go out throughout the building. Lucello is caught in a trap and has to be left behind. Arkin and Paz find Elena strapped to an autopsy table, but when they approach, they are trapped in a cage that falls from above. The Collector appears and threatens to burn down the building, but Arkin manages to open the cage by having Elena re-break his arm so that he can reach the latch.
The group escapes and finds an exit door to the building, but it is jammed from the outside. The Collector appears again, kills Paz, and easily beats Arkin in a fist fight, thanks to the latter's broken arm. As the Collector is about to kill Arkin, Lucello intervenes, having escaped from his trap, and sacrifices himself so that Arkin can gain the upper hand. Arkin beats the Collector, throws him down a chute, and sets it on fire. As the building burns down, the firefighters hear Elena's screams and open the door from the outside, allowing Elena and Arkin to escape. As the two sit outside, Arkin notices a pile of trunks and, upon searching inside them, finds the Collector's burned mask with no corpse.
Sometime later, Arkin manages to track down the Collector's house by researching every registered entomologist within a 200-mile radius of their last encounter. Arkin confronts the unmasked Collector, holds him at gunpoint, and taunts him about his father, a museum curator who, Arkin has learned, was responsible for the Collector's madness and modus operandi. Arkin announces his intentions of torturing and eventually killing the Collector, so that he can never harm anyone again. When the Collector tries to attack him, Arkin forces him into the red trunk and locks him inside while cursing him and bashing his fingers with the trunk.

Cast

UK release

The Collection has been licensed for a UK DVD run by eOne, and was released on April 29, 2013.

International distribution

The International distribution rights of The Collection are licensed by Cinema Management Group.

Reception

Critical reception

The film holds a score of 36 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 15 critics, indicating a "generally unfavorable reviews". On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 37% based on 49 reviews and an average rating of 4.17/10. The site's consensus reads, "The Collection offers more grisly thrills and twisted humor than its predecessor; in other words, fun for genre fans, but unpleasant for anyone else".

Box office

On its opening weekend, The Collection grossed $3.1 million across 1,403 theaters in the United States, about $500,000 less than the opening weekend of the first film. The worldwide gross was $8.9 million.

Sequel

On May 2, 2019 Josh Stewart announced that there will be a third entry in the series, currently going by the title The Collected.