One: Cut a hole in a box. Two: Put a head in that box.

When is the last time anyone went to a horror movie actually expecting to be scared? Most are lazy messes better described as shock-comedy — what you’ll see is disgusting and how you’ll react is with disapproving laughter.

All things considered, The Collection — a direct and ultimately worthless sequel to 2009’s The Collector — may just be the pauper king of the ever-expanding heap of terrible faux-horror torture porn.

With a film such as The Collection, the audience and filmmakers both understand the movie won’t be the next Citizen Kane. There’s an understanding it won’t be art, and that it probably won’t even be intelligent.

It’s hard to evaluate something people enjoy because they “know it’s bad.” But knowing or not, The Collection is bad. Really bad, and not in a remotely entertaining way. The depths to which The Collection sinks in its quest to ape every aspect of the Saw series are so maddeningly unforgivable as to spit in the face of everything that might make torture porn fun.

What’s so bad? Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: The story — something about a serial killer — appears to have been written on a napkin at a Fangoria magazine meet and greet, and the rest was ad-libbed over a weekend. One doesn’t expect Quentin Tarantino-levels of narrative complexity from a B-horror sequel, but The Collection is brain-dead stupid from top to bottom, to the point of distraction.

Somehow, screenwriters Marcus Dunstan (Piranha 3DD, also the director) and Patrick Melton (Piranha 3DD) thought it would be a sensible move to shoehorn in every fad possible, from raves to zombies. Not typical undead zombies, mind you, but one of the characters gives an overly long explanation of why it’s appropriate to refer to The Collector’s minions as zombies, just because, you know, zombies are popular these days.

Furthermore, none of the actors seem to care about acting — even their screams lack gusto — and the atrocious editing is best described as a seizure-inducing montage.

This is all to be begrudgingly expected in this kind of film, but The Collection ignores the cardinal element of torture porn — gore. Of all the things to skimp on. The movie’s viscera is quite possibly the lamest seen in a wide-release horror film in a very long time.

A bad horror film can still be good fun if it has imaginative dismemberments preceded by the orgasmic shriek of a sexy young broad.

And yet the movie fails to provide either. Where did that multimillion dollar budget go? You can buy a lot of FX makeup with an estimated $10 million budget. Instead, we are mostly treated to digital blood spatter and few fake broken bones, neither of which is the least bit interesting.

The Collection, unaware of its own irony, opens with a visual metaphor for all bad horror. All modern torture porn is just a glitzy sizzle-real of half-naked girls being tossed into a meat grinder. With this film, we actually see a giant meat grinder tear apart a sea of young dancing girls at a club.

After this incredibly boring opening set piece, the movie spirals downward, passing such quality barriers as “SyFy Channel original movie” and “amateur backyard wrestling,” finally stopping somewhere around the “bottom-feeding rip-off” section of this year’s worst films.

The real torture is just having to sit through the entire movie.

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