Shits and Dr. Giggles

Here's what I have to say about Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence):

Just kidding! Of course I have more to say than that. I just wish the movie were a tenth as good as this video.

You'd probably think that a movie about a doctor who surgically attaches three people ass-to-mouth-to-ass-to-mouth would be anything but boring. Alas, The Human Centipede is dull, dull, dull. Once you understand its conceit (and if you haven't been keeping up with the considerable hype, you understand plenty after reading the first sentence of this paragrah), the movie has little more to offer than some yellow pus, pulled teeth and gunplay in terms of surprises. Unlike eye-pummel fests such as Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, or whatever else you want to pick from the 20 or so films that consistently end up on Most Disturbing Movies Of All Time!!!! lists, Centipede cannot keep up its pace or its propensity to shock. (It never even reveals its human mash-up invention its entirety -- the individuals of the centipede remain wrapped in gauze and we only see a few stray shots of ass-mouth attachment.) It is essentially one really sophisticated Saw trap stretched out to run the course of an entire film. After a while, it practically ceases its narrative structure and collapses into a pile of whimpers.

Set in Germany, The Human Centipede arrives with a pile of horror cliches in tow. American ignorance descends upon a foreign land with a fatal outcome (An American Werewolf In London, Hostel, The Ruins, Turistas) when two bimbos prone to making the worst possible decision when given the choice decide to travel to the city for some fun (Last House on the Left), get lost and then a flat tire (The Hills Have Eyes) that was probably intentionally inflicted (Hills again, also Wrong Turn), come to find they have no cell-phone service (every horror movie ever), are sexually harassed by a stranger in a perverted calm before the storm (Hostel 2), go searching for some help and come upon a house in the woods (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) that is owned by a mad scientist who wants to use them for an extreme human experiment (Guinea Pig/the Holocaust). In the end, there is a final girl. I bet there are dozens more previous films that could be filled in along the way. Said house owner, Dr. Heiter, is as over-the-top as Freddy Krueger on his mugging-est, most one-liner filled day. Before the roofies with which he spikes the girls drinks kick in (he makes sure to point out that he's given them "the rape drug," just in case the sexual violence of this all needs reinforcing), he hisses at them, "I don't like human beings." When he gets to the part of the explanation of his experiment in which he unveils its name, he spits it out with the kind of grandeur that can only accompany an actor stating the title of the movie that he's appearing in. After the surgery, he bellows, "I did it. Ha! Ha! Ha!" Literally, he does it like that, with each "Ha!" distinct and pronounced. Following an unlikely chase that finds the centipede making their way up spiral stairs, an injured Heiter slowly follows them, pausing to lick the blood off a step. A few of this movie's supporters point out its dark humor, but Heiter is pure, unambiguous camp.

The cliches beg you to consider this movie in the scheme of horror cinema, and from that angle Centipede's inventiveness merits praise. In a horror landscape that looks like piles of garbage being readied for recycling, the human-attachment aspect of Centipede really does stick out as fresh. And when's the last time the very concept of a film had so many people rapt with morbid curiosity? Too bad the conceit is as figuratively a bunch of crap as it is literally. Heiter's plan is for his three-person creation to share a digestive system, but merely attaching people and leaving their intestines intact does not accomplish this. The head eats, digests and shits into the middle's mouth which goes through her digestive system and passes to the next only to go through her digestive system. Oh yeah, and if you only eat shit, you die really quick. You'd think a licensed professional (one who bills himself as "the leading surgeon in separating Siamese twins") would understand that the basic workings of the human body ordain his creation to fail. You think he'd also know that nobody says "Siamese twins" anymore, particularly licensed professionals. I suppose this makes the tagline ("100% medically accurate") more camp.

All the moaning and complaining, the suffersploitation, the solitude of Heiter and the centipede head's tearful confession about his crooked life prior to having a woman's lips attached to his anus, suggest that life is shit. Well, it only follows that so is this movie.

Comments

[Bapril]

You warned me, Rich, but I just had to watch this movie anyway. My husband will never forgive me as I forced him to suffer along with me.

Festering turd. No pun intended.

[partelo]

When I saw this I instantly thought about the amazing movie "Martyrs" that you reviewed. I was kind of hoping that this movie would at least compete.... No? Damn.

[The Human Centipede (2009)]

The beginning of this movie reads like a text book of bad horror films. It all started with the acting of the two girls. I won't go as far as to say it was horrendous, but it left very much to be desired.

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I have had in quite some time, with a quick start that ups gears rapidly to become a truly barking beast . The film concerns two young American women travelling through Germany who suffer a flat tire and end up trapped in the house of the deranged Dr Heiter, an eminent surgeon with some warped ideas. And then, well you can guess from the title the way things go, and even without graphic surgery or oodles of gore the film still succeeds in horrifying.

[Speetdype]

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