marcus dunstan – Horror Ghouls

Elena Peters is a teenager who goes to a party with friends. Upon seeing her boyfriend making out with another girl, she needs some space and ends up in an isolated room, where she finds a wooden trunk. Someone is inside, and when she opens it, Arkin (from the first movie The Collector) is released. This sets off a bunch of deadly booby traps, and Elena’s friends and a lot of the other party-people are killed left and right, while The Collector watches it all unfold until he kidnaps Elena for his collection. Arkin, on the other hand, manages to escape by jumping out of a window which causes him to break his arm. At the hospital, he is happy to learn that his wife and daughter are safe, but also learns that Elena has a wealthy father who has hired a team of mercenaries to hunt down The Collector. Arkin is the only known survivor that has been to The Collector’s place, and the mercenaries wants him to join them. They end up at an abandoned hotel, where everything is of course booby-trapped from top to bottom and we finally get to see some of The Collector’s collection…

The Collection is a horror film from 2012, the sequel of the 2009 film The Collector. Once again directed by Marcus Dunstan and co-written with Patrick Melton, the movie follows the story very much immediately after the end of the first one. The movie opens with a scene that, while it doesn’t surpass it, reminds me a bit of the opening scene in Ghost Ship (2002). This gives everything an even more over-the-top energy, and The Collector suddenly goes from a smart and sadistic serial killer to an outright Batman/Superhero-type villain. It’s just a bit too excessive to be especially believable, but who the fuck cares. Now it’s time for some non-stop gore action, and the serial killer’s domain are giving off more Saw-vibes than ever. The traps and conceptions inside the hotel always lead to gruesome deaths, and we also get to see some of The Collector’s displays…let’s just say it’s not only bugs that are inside those exhibits.

There are also a few horror references as well here, like the abandoned hotel which is called “Hotel Argento“ (obviously a nod to Dario Argento), and the mannequins in the hotel were also a nod to Maniac (1980).

Overall, The Collection is a fun gore-filled time which is a pretty decent sequel to the first movie, and just like the first it doesn’t require too many brain cells to watch. Sure, in some ways there are things that feel even more over-the-top and nonsensical than the first, but whatever. It’s a brainless serial-killer-villain gore ride, and works perfectly fine for what it is. The movie does end with quite the cliffhanger, so let’s hope that the third installment gets out of development hell soon. Because, yes, there is a third film underway, but it’s one that’s been going through a ton of setbacks: ever since announcing the third film in 2012, which will have the title The Collected, everything have moved at a snail’s pace and gotten one setback after the other. In 2019 a poster was unveiled, and filming began on September 23, 2019. Then, after eight days of filming, the production was unexpectedly shut down, with plans of starting up again in late October. Nope, didn’t happen. Then, it was said it would begin in 2021, but again no such luck. In April 2021, Dunstan claimed that props had been stolen from the set, and on top of that, he does not have the rights to the film so he couldn’t finish it on his own. And then, in 2022, it was reported that the production had been delayed but not cancelled, and finally in 2024 Dunstan revealed it’s in development. Damn, what a mess. So we’ll just have to cross our fingers and wait and see, hopefully we’ll get the third (and perhaps final) entry so this will be a pretty good trilogy.

Director: Marcus Dunstan
Writers: Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan
Country & year: USA, 2012
Actors: Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Christopher McDonald, Lee Tergesen, Tim Griffin, Andre Royo, Randall Archer, Shannon Kane, Brandon Molale, Erin Way, Johanna Braddy, Michael Nardelli
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748227/

Prequel: The Collector (2009)

Arkin O´Brien is a handyman who is working for the Chase family. He’s a former convict, and his wife is in debt to loan sharks who wants to get paid due by midnight. Arkin then desperately makes a plan: he decides to steal a valuable ruby from the Chase home. After all, the family was going on a vacation so the house would be empty, so this would be like stealing candy from a baby, right? No such luck, though. While there, he finds that someone else got there before him, and they’re not after the ruby or any other valuables…he sees the father of the family getting dragged down into the basement by a masked man. Not only that, but when Arkin tries to call 911, he discovers that the entire house has been booby-trapped and rigged with all kinds of deadly devices. Even the windows have been boarded up and lined with razors. When he finds out that the entire Chase family has been captured by this masked madman, he discovers that the little girl of the family has been able to hide. He decides to try and save her, despite feeling like a fly trapped in a spider’s dangerous net.

The Collector is a horror film from 2009, written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, and directed by Dunstan. The original script was titled The Midnight Man, and was actually at one point considered a spin-off prequel to the Saw franchise as some kind of origin story of Jigsaw. Fortunately, as this movie stands very well on its own, this idea was dismissed by the producers and the script was re-written into an original story.

Despite the re-write of the script, the Saw/Jigsaw-esque traps are very prominent throughout the movie, and they are always sadistic and inventive. I also find the spider-like appearance and antics of the masked man to be quite enjoyable, making him stand out a bit from the all too generic slasher/serial killer villain by giving him some features of his very own. His victims are trapped in his spiderweb, so to speak, and you just gotta admire how the guy manages to put the most elaborate traps all over the place in no time. It’s like Kevin from Home Alone grew up to be a serial killer.

The kills are brutal and gory, delivering plenty of graphic moments. The serial killer comes off as mysterious and pretty creepy, with no background story or any actual motive or reasoning behind what he does. We do realize there is some kind of fascination towards bugs or especially spiders (there are also several spider shots throughout the film), and the black glowing contact lenses he appears to be using which makes his face appear more bug-like. He “collects“ one from each of his killing sprees, but for what reason, we can (at least for now) just speculate. In this movie the character was played by Juan Fernández.

While The Collector is, overall, a pretty fun time, you can’t really help but noticing a few puzzling and nonsensical things regarding the killer. Why take everything to such great lengths by booby-trapping the entire home, when he’d already captured the family and had them tied up? It wasn’t like he expected any visitors. Not to mention how fast he could put up all those traps…but hey, all of that is nitpicking for a movie that doesn’t really take itself all too serious to begin with. It is a fun home invasion/serial killer thriller, with a bit of Saw meets Home Alone.

Director: Marcus Dunstan
Writers: Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan
Country & year: USA, 2009
Actors: William Prael, Diane Ayala Goldner, Juan Fernández, Josh Stewart, Michael Reilly Burke, Andrea Roth, Karley Scott Collins, Madeline Zima, Haley Pullos, Daniella Alonso
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844479/

Sequel: The Collection (2012)

Tag: marcus dunstan

The Collection (2012)

The Collector (2009)