Home, Not Alone

Films: The Collector (2009)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I got an Amazon Fire for Father’s Day, which will be one of the ways I end up watching a lot of streaming movies in the future. The Collector may be the first movie I’ve reviewed with this viewing method, but it’s not the first movie I watched on this device. I broke it in with something better and far less odious.

The horror world has a number of subgenres. For instance, there is the torture porn subgenre, of which I am very much not a fan. There’s also the home invasion subgenre, which has a surprisingly large number of films in it. The Collector from 2009 (not to be confused with the vastly superior film of the same name from the ‘60s) is a bit of both. It’s also a film that requires a vast amount of suspension of disbelief. To make The Collector work in your head, you have to make a lot of allowances for what is happening on the screen. This is a reverse of Home Alone, where the home intruder has managed to set up a number of dangerous and potentially lethal booby traps. How? When did he find the time to do this? Shut up and turn your brain off and watch the movie.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1965

The Contenders:

William Wyler: The Collector
John Schlesinger: Darling
David Lean: Doctor Zhivago
Robert Wise: The Sound of Music (winner)
Hiroshi Teshigahara: Woman in the Dunes

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 1965

The Contenders:

Cat Ballou
The Collector
Dr. Zhivago (winner)
Ship of Fools
A Thousand Clowns

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1965

The Contenders:

Samantha Eggar: The Collector
Julie Christie: Darling (winner)
Elizabeth Hartman: A Patch of Blue
Simone Signoret: Ship of Fools
Julie Andrews: The Sound of Music

Killing Jar

Film: The Collector
Format: DVD from NetFlix on various players.

When I put together the post on Best Picture for 1965, I said that the one film I thought might eventually make the list for me as something I’d nominate was The Collector. Having seen it now, I wish I’d waited on Best Picture for that year, because this would absolutely make my list of top movies for that year, particularly in a year as weak on nominations as 1965. I’m not sure I’d pick it over The Battle of Algiers or The Shop on Main Street, but it may well be the best English language film of its year. I suspected that I’d like it. What I didn’t expect was a film this emotionally upsetting and, frankly, good. Why do films like this get lost in history? This is a film that (no joke) should be spoken of in the same sentence as Psycho and Peeping Tom.

As with plenty of thrillers, the high concept here is devilishly simple. A timid, socially awkward butterfly collector named Freddie Clegg (an almost disturbingly youthful Terence Stamp) wins a great deal of money in a football (soccer for those of us on the left of the Atlantic) pool. This allows him to leave his dead end job as a bank clerk and buy an old country house. Once there, he fixes up a basement apartment and, with the chloroform he uses to kill his butterflies, he kidnaps an art student named Miranda Grey (Samantha Eggar). She is someone he’s pined for from afar his whole life, and now, much like his butterflies, he has collected her.