The Collection (2012)

The Collection arrives in 2012 as a direct continuation of The Collector, and it wastes no time announcing its intentions. A party becomes an abattoir. A young woman named Elena is locked in a trunk. A team of mercenaries is hired by her wealthy father to drag her out of an abandoned hotel rigged with traps. The film is a machine built to deliver gore, and it operates with grim efficiency. Somewhere in the machinery there is a pit of spikes, a room of hanged bodies, and a man who must re-break his own arm to reach a latch. Nowhere is there a single moment of instruction, moral or otherwise.

The supporting cast includes Andre Royo, Navi Rawat, and Shannon Kane, and their presence is entirely incidental. They are bodies in a corridor, not arguments. Race is never raised, and the film shows no interest in raising it. Elena spends most of the running time as a hostage awaiting rescue, though she manages a brief scuffle before being hauled away again. Her hearing aid factors into exactly one scene, where a feral girl named Abby decides it makes her a liability. The film treats this as a logistical wrinkle. It is not a subject.

What remains is a lean and unpleasant thing with no designs on our conscience. There is no ecological dread, no indictment of the wealthy father who finances the expedition, no reconsideration of the historical record, no sermonizing of any kind. It is a slab of meat hung in a cold room, and it seems content to be exactly that. We score it accordingly, with the sommelier's note that this particular vintage offers almost nothing for the modern palate to swirl. A rare specimen: horror that simply wants to hurt you, and asks nothing else of the world.