Mike S

If you would have told me that Kevin Smith (he of Clerks and Smodcast fame) would reinvent himself as one of the better genre film directors after a series of missteps I would have laughed in your face. Yet he has followed up the effective thriller Red State with the shockingly moving full on body horror film Tusk. It's a bizarre movie that admittedly owes a debt to the success of The Human Centipede. Yet Smith reaches for something more than shock for shock's sake, and while the film stumbles with some tonal third act miscues, it's an overall recommend.

I've been writing for a bit that creative types need to find new, innovative ways for found footage films to still work. The tried-and-true method of running around a cryptic woods or haunted house has been played out in the wake of the unending deluge of Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity clones. Luckily recent films like The Den and the upcoming Affliction have taken advantage of streaming video and mobile technologies to craft terse, exciting tales of horror. However, films like Alien Abduction make me sit back and consider eating my words.

By almost all measures, The Collection isn’t a movie that should exist. A sequel to the lightly regarded The Collector, a film cobbled together of an unused Saw script. The original hit at the tail end of horror’s extreme torture phase, and it came and went without much fanfare. Yet director Marcus Dunstan and his co-writer Patrick Melton returned for a second go-round. What’s more surprising than the fact the The Collection, now out on DVD/Blu-Ray/VOD exists at all is that it’s a pretty damn entertaining film.