The Collector

John Fowles' first novel, The Collector, describes with insight and tension the relationship between a bizarre, socially awkward man and the young student he kidnaps and keeps locked up in his basement. It's a page-turner with a unique voice, similar in that sense to The Wasp Factory and The Catcher in the Rye. As when White Noise came out a few years ago, my initial delight at seeing one of my favourite novels adapted for cinema was displaced by disappointment when I discovered they shared only a title. But I heard The Collector was the latest so-called 'torture porn' horror from Marcus Dunstan who made Saw and so, as I am quite fond both of the sub-genre and the franchise, I gave it a go regardless.

The premise: Arkin, a softly-spoken former jailbird, is renovating a rich family's home. They like him, and reward him with cash and praise. Unfortunately, not enough cash - he owes his ex-wife money she needs before midnight in order to pay loan sharks: or else...

He decides the only way to obtain this money at such short notice is to break into his employers' home and steal from their safe. There's gratitude for you. But he has a stroke of bad luck - wouldn't you just know it, the local hooded psychopath has done a Home Alone and turned the place into a massive booby-trapped deathpit.

And that's about it. Arkin tries to rescue the family from the collector - for it is he - with fairly predictable results. There's plenty of gore (much of it not too easy to make out because of the darkness of the setting), several deaths, no plot beyond that described above, and very little character development. In fact, about the collector himself - whose motivations and background are surely the most intriguing - we learn nothing. Oh, apart from the fact that if he likes you, he might 'collect' you (a fate little better than what awaits if he doesn't like you). For all we know, this is Macauley Culkin's Kevin McAllister grown up, traumatised by the horrific injuries he was led to inflict in his formative years and reliving those events in an increasingly violent destructive spiral. (I'd be happy to come on board, if anyone at Lionsgate is reading this and wants my help writing Home Alone 5.)

As Mark Kermode pointed out on his 5Live show, in a section that might have made me think twice before seeing the film if I'd heard it in time, it might as well be called "the Trainspotter - because if you look like a train, he lets you live".

I concede that the film isn't entirely without merit. The high-tension chases around the house were fairly well done, especially considering the dark set (something I normally despise). And the gory stuff was quite well-shot without being hugely inventive. But why not wrap this up in a bit of plot and character stuff, I wonder? It seemed to be aimed squarely at the audience with whom I found myself sharing the cinema when I saw it: teenage boys determined to show their mates how insensitive to nasty violence they are by laughing through the goriest scenes.

So, congratulations, Dunstan and Co, for letting torture porn sink to its ground state: providing cheap, unexciting thrills for idiots. I hope you're proud of yourselves.