Horror Show: The Collector’s “torture porn’’ provides gore, not genuine surprises.

Co-written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton with an eye toward the crimson-drenched ultra violence of the Saw films, The Collector gets off to what appears at first to be a whole new tack on the rapidly bleeding-out horror subgenre handily labeled “torture porn.”

Josh Stewart plays Arkin, a seemingly nice-enough handyman with a troubled past, who has been hired to beef up the security at the mansion of the wealthy and entirely unsympathetic Chase family, headed by growly husband Michael (Michael Reilly Burke) and Botox-injecting wife Victoria (Andrea Roth).

The Chases are on their way out of town for a weekend getaway with their bright tween daughter Hannah (Karley Scott Collins), while rebellious teen offspring Jill (Madeline Zima, of Californication) opts to pout and stay behind in favor of nailing some boyfriend action. The twist here arrives with Arkin’s back story: He’s an ex-con, a professional burglar with a skill set which includes not only breaking and entering but also safecracking.

As it turns out, his estranged wife is desperate for cash to pay off some unidentified loan sharks who have promised to make her life a living hell if their usurious outlay isn’t repaid in full by midnight that very night. Arkin, a housebreaker with a heart of gold – much is made of his dedication to his own young daughter – opts to burgle the Chases’ home and retrieve a fist-sized gemstone he knows is secreted in an upstairs safe.

The film kicks into Saw-style overdrive when, in the midst of cracking the combination, Arkin discovers he is not alone, and a far worse sort of home invader, the Collector (Juan Fernández, sporting a bizarre full-head mask that looks as though it’s made entirely of scorched marshmallows) has arrived to install some unspecified home improvements of his own. These include, in no particular order, a series of Rube Goldberg-esque mantraps secreted around the house.

Cue the Chase family’s unexpected return and you have, well, a butcher’s dozen of top-notch gore effects, some occasionally suspenseful cat-and-mousery between Arkin and the Collector, and a whole lot of mangled rich people. Unfortunately, what you don’t have is much of anything in the way of explanatory back story (outside of Arkin).

We never learn who – or what – this Collector is, or what, exactly, he collects, or even his motivation for slaughtering the already insufferable Chase family. Plot holes abound, one of the most egregious of which is the entirely relevant question of how the Collector managed to booby-trap the house in what seems like only a few hours while the family was away. Motivation, means and madness are often just flat-out ignored in favor of some seriously deafening sound design and Saw-influenced visuals, which make the whole film look as though it was shot through a particularly nasty cataract.

This is Dunstan’s feature debut and both he and co-writer Melton have Project Greenlight’s Feast on their screenwriting record as well as entries 4-7 of the Saw films. But if anything The Collector ends up feeling like a series of leftover gore gags from those earlier, freakier horror shows. It will probably get your date to crawl into your lap (or ask for some earplugs), but The Collector feels like the final, welcome nail in the bizarrely popular torture-porn coffin.

THE COLLECTOR (1½) • Directed by Marcus Dunstan • Starring Josh Stewart, Madeline Zima, Andrea Roth • Rated R • 88 mins • At Maya Cinemas and Osio Cinemas.