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The torture never stops.

"The Collector"
Photo: Sony Pictures

To say that "The Collector" is a torture-porn movie of a particularly vile and hateful sort is already to waste more words than the picture merits. Still, gore fans should be aware that this is not an especially scary film in any but the most primitive big-boo sense. It's a monotonous procession of gouged eyes, crushed hands, snapped necks, ripped guts, barbed-wire bindings, fish-hook torments and nail-board impalings. There's also a cat that loses its tail to a slammed window, and a little girl who's terrorized in the most deplorable ways. The film's real subject, though, is human agony, which it celebrates with a leering sadism. I'd like to think that even the hard-core gore audience won't sit still for this tedious mess (where's Eli Roth when you really need him?), but I guess we'll see.

The director, Marcus Dunstan (making his feature debut), and his cowriter, Patrick Melton, labored together on the last two "Saw" movies, and apparently decided that those films were lumbered with way too much story. Here things are simpler. A guy named Arkin (Josh Stewart) is employed on a construction crew doing repairs on a big country house owned by a well-to-do family. After work, he learns that, for reasons too strained to be worth recounting, he has to come up with a large sum of money by midnight. Arkin knows that the family — mom, dad, two daughters — has left the house to go on vacation, and that the father (Michael Reilly Burke) has a large, valuable jewel tucked away in a safe. Arkin decides to steal it. He returns to the house that evening — and discovers that the whole place has been elaborately booby-trapped by an amazingly well-organized masked killer. Gleaming butcher knives hang down from chandeliers, deadly wires have been rigged at neck height in the hallways, bear traps clutter the floors — and the family is still home, much against its will.

That's it. Arkin finds himself transformed from intruder to rescuer — not a very effective one, as it turns out. (Although he himself does manage to escape a hammer and chisel that are taken to his teeth at one point.) The killer is a hulking cipher, very much of the Michael Myers variety — although "Halloween," along with having an actual story, also had a rich visual style. "The Collector," which was shot in Louisiana in under three weeks, is a dismal mush of post-mortem blues and greens and general murk. The soundtrack, by former Nine Inch Nails drummer Jerome Dillon, is ludicrously overwrought — an extended eruption of growling synths, corny heartbeat effects and electro-percussion onslaughts that sound like a group of drunken children beating on soup cans. I felt a deep sympathy for the blameless actors trapped in this lamentable undertaking. The director stirred feelings of a different sort.

Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Funny People," "Not Quite Hollywood" and "Thirst," also new in theaters this week.

Check out everything we've got on "The Collector."

For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.

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