The Collection (film)

Plot

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. There, she discovers a red trunk and opens it to find a severely injured Arkin O'Brien. Arkin grabs Elena and they dodge a steel spear, which triggers a series of deadly traps that kill everyone on the dance floor. 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. Arkin takes the opportunity to escape from Lucello. 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. Members of Lucello's team are killed or captured. Elena eventually finds a prisoner named Abby, who claims to be the Collector's "favorite" and is reluctant to break his rules. The two are separated when the Collector finds them.

Eventually, Lucello and his surviving team capture Arkin in a room, but the Collector intervenes, kills most of the team, and captures a team member named Paz. Later, Elena and Lucello reunite, rescue Paz, and find Abby, who asks to escape with them. Abby later tries to provide information of the group's location to the Collector before being killed. As police converge at the hotel, attracted to gunshots fired by Arkin, the Collector again kidnaps Elena. Lucello is caught in a trap and forced 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 fistfight thanks to the latter's broken arm. As the Collector is about to kill Arkin, Lucello intervenes, having escaped his trap, and sacrifices himself so that Arkin can gain the upper hand. Arkin beats the Collector, throws him down a chute, and lights it on fire. As the building burns down, the fire department hears Elena's screams and opens 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 whom, 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 he can never harm anyone again. When the Collector tries to attack Arkin, Arkin forces him into the red trunk and locks him inside.

Cast

Critical reception

The film has received mixed to negative reviews from critics, it currently 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, with an average rating of 4.1/10. 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 $3,104,269 across 1,403 theaters, about $500,000 less than the opening weekend of the first film. Ending with a total of $6.8 million, it grossed less than the first film's $7.7 million. The film became box office success collecting 25 million worldwide.

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 being licensed by Cinema Management Group.