The Collection

Here’s a sequel that knows what it’s doing.

The Collection wastes no time. The opening nightclub sequence alone justifies the price of admission. Bodies drop like rain. Blood sprays like confetti. The Collector lurks in the rafters like an evil Batman, orchestrating mass murder with Rube Goldberg precision.

This is nasty, efficient fun. Then it gets smarter.

Josh Stewart returns as Arkin, our everyman surrogate, and he remains refreshingly pragmatic. When heroine Emma opens a trunk and springs the traps, Arkin tries to save her. When the Collector arrives, Arkin sizes up the situation and—in a heartbeat—realizes he can’t win. Instead, he jumps out a window, using a corpse to cushion his fall. Breaks his arm but saves his life.

Later, hired to rescue Emma from the Collector’s lair, Arkin refuses to go inside. He’ll point the way, that’s it. They force him at gunpoint. Now he’s got to dodge both the rescue team and the villain.

This is Aliens to the first film’s Alien. More action, higher stakes, bigger body count. The Collector’s warehouse lair is loaded with traps and drugged-up victims who attack like rabid zombies. It’s a house of horrors that actually horrifies.

The script is lean and mean. Eighty-two minutes. No fat. When the Collector threatens Arkin’s family, Arkin tells his estranged wife to grab their daughter and run. Don’t pack. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Just go. She goes. No argument, no melodrama, no third-act twist where she turns up captured. Sanity in a horror film—imagine that.

Emma has a hearing aid. The film treats it like glasses—a detail, not a plot device. One great scene where it falls out and she has to snatch it from a bear trap, then the movie moves on. A lazier film would’ve made it a third-act MacGuffin.

The big plot hole remains: How does one man set up hundreds of elaborate traps? Don’t think about it. Accept the Collector as comic-book myth, not realistic serial killer. The movie earns this leap by committing fully to its heightened reality.

This is lean, mean genre filmmaking. It knows what worked before and delivers more of it, harder and faster. While Hollywood keeps churning out bloated Saw sequels, here’s a franchise that understood the assignment: escalate, entertain, and get out before you wear out your welcome.

Why aren’t there ten of these?