So, the Collector, is a tense movie about a dude who does horrible things to a family, inside a house, and another fellow, who breaks into the house to rob it while these horrible things are happening. And it’s a damn creepy movie, with a good variety of disturbing traps. Most of the traps make some amount of mechanical sense.

And then we have the Collection, the sequel, where he goes from a horror movie bad guy to super villain levels of evil. We get news reports that he’s terrorizing the city, we get him committing mass murder at a nightclub, using a threshing machine to clear the dance floor, some sort of hydraulic press elevator to crush the people in the lobby, and some random blade traps. Cool traps, but a bit nonsensical compared to his previous set. 

He kidnaps a girl, and in the process, on of his previous victims gets away. In the first one, we knew he brought his previous victims along to the new houses, though it wasn’t really clear why. In this one, he’s trying to complete his collection. Since in this film, he’s got a base. An abandoned hotel, the Argento, a nod to the famous horror director, I suppose. And the hotel is rigged with booby traps and filled with people he’s turned feral with drugs.

We get some scenes very reminiscent of a zombie movie, where the rescue team are shooting zombies. We get some traps, which make even less sense than the previous ones. And of course, we get to see his collection, various taxidermied folks, preserved in some liquid, that for whatever isn’t flammable. Which is important, since smashing these tanks provides liquid that puts out the fire that he’s started to destroy the evidence. 

And of course, he gets away, and then our main victim tracks him down later, stuffs him in a box. Which isn’t really a horror movie ending, unless becoming the monster is the horror of it. 

Really, I’d have a hard time imagining how the two films could be more different. The main characters are the same, but the motives, methods and abilities aren’t. Well, I suppose the burglar fellow uses his lock picking skills again in the second film.