It's a good 18 months since news emerged that 2009's slasher sleaze-fest The Collector was getting the sequel treatment. Since then, writer/director Marcus Dunstan has been waylayed by Piranha 3DD, but The Collection** is still happening, and to prove it, here's the first official still.
Yup, it's the masked man, with a knife. No really amazing spoilers there. We initially thought it was a new mask, but then we realised that, in the first movie, we never really saw it in any great detail (except from the lace-up back), and probably never this well-lit. So it may have been slightly tweaked, but we think it's actually basically the same.
Josh Stewart is returning for The Collection as hapless housebreaker Arkin, which is intriguing, since things weren't looking too good him when we last saw him, after The Collector's credits (you stayed that long, right?). His circumstances have improved in the meantime, as The Collection picks him up in hospital. There's not much time for rest or recuperation though, as a band of mercenaries abduct him, blackmail him (he's a burglar, after all), and set him back to work tracking down the Collector's sadistically booby-trapped lair.
We're not sure about the mercenaries angle here, but a poke around the Collector's hide-out can only be good news. For us, if not Arkin.
The film will be in Real-D 3D, rather than the retro-fitted variety, and as before, the screenplay is by Dunstan and Patrick Melton, who wrote the final four Saw films (The Collector was originally written as a Saw prequel before being re-tooled). Melton promises a trailer before too long, and a release in the winter.