It’s fairly rare that a film can come along and generate a lot of attention just based on the premise. The Human Centipede was one such film. It claimed to be “100% Medically Accurate,” was viewed at Fantastic Fest, and took the world by storm by asking the question “What would it be like to sew a bunch of people ass to mouth?”
At the time, I was hard on the claim that the flick was medically accurate, despite writer/director Tom Six‘s insistence. I’ve since changed my mind: sure, it’s entirely possible to sew a bunch of people together like that as long as you expect them to choke on feces and die relatively quickly. There is no shared digestion, but hey, he never said it was 100% a good idea!
Unfortunately, that flick wasn’t 100% good. For me, I found it to be 52% good, which, as it turns out, is at least 30% better than the follow-up. Hey hey hey hey, listen to me. Spoilers ahead.
Kills
If there’s one thing this film does, it’s squander a lot of potential. There are a couple of other things the film does better than killing as well, but I was pleasantly surprised that the body count was massively upped from the first installment. At least 17 people die in this movie.
Ills
The vast majority of the ills revolve around our pudgy protagonist (wait – if the film follows a bad guy is he still the protagonist?) shooting someone non-fatally and then delicately swinging a crow-bar in their direction. Through the magic of film we’re supposed to believe that he’s hitting them rather hard, but many of the shots look tepid. There are a few good gore gags, namely when a woman has her head crushed in by said crow-bar, and later when the centipede gets going. There’s plenty of poo-poo, gun shots, stabbings, barbed wire raping, and the anal insertion of insects. If that all sounds awesome, temper yourself – most of it is reserved the finale and what leads up to it is boring as shit.
Lust
It turns out that The Human Centipede was a movie, and we see a clip of it that involves some breasts. Later we see some of the victims stripped nude, so there are plenty of butts, some dirty boobs, and a slightly smaller than average prosthetic penis. There’s also a blow-job scene and some masturbation. Oh and the barbed wire rape. Hey, depends what you’re into.
Learning
If you’re going to make a fucked up film, make a 100% fucked up film. Don’t make an 80% boring film followed by a fucked up sequence. Go hard, get hard, go home.
Review
You’re a smart kid, you’ve probably picked up by now that I didn’t really enjoy the film. Most of it feels like a student film. There is piss-poor CGI rain that I am 97% certain is just the “rain” filter on iMovie. It looks bad.
I previously mentioned how effeminate the crow-bar attacks are – scratch that, that’s offensive to women. It’s beyond effeminate. Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) is such a little nancy, one should feel shame most of all if you died at his stubby little hands.
For as sick and twisted as this film is supposed to be, it’s mostly tame until the last fifteen or so minutes. There’s one good gore gag in the middle, but there is wasted opportunity everywhere. Martin is a fucked up dude, it wouldn’t be a stretch for him to kill a crying baby, but the film backs off and he doesn’t. Instead Martin just weakly taps a few people with the crow bar again and fires off a few gun shots.
Luckily this film advertises itself as “100% Medically INAccurate,” otherwise I’d have to point out that you don’t inject a laxative into someone’s butt cheeks to get them to shit into another person’s mouth. Although, beyond that, the film is potentially more accurate than the first, since the centipede is held together with duct tape and staples.
During the majority of the film, I was beyond bored. I was angry and upset. Where was the fucking movie that was supposed to disturb me? Even when it comes time for the gore, a lot of the effect is lost because the movie is just poorly made. The climactic shitting diarrhea scene is full of Harold and Kumar level fart noises. It’s like Blazing Saddles is playing in the background. Which is sad, because the climax is actually pretty messed up and violent. There are a few bits that are stupid, but man, some of it is spot on awesomely messed up. But there’s no way to ignore the preceding 80 minutes of shit.
Now, at the very end of the movie, we see our boy Martin sitting in his booth watching the film. It appears that this entire movie may have been a dream. If that’s the case, I’m very disappointed that the majority of it was boring. It could have gone so far above and beyond depraved. This could have been the sick film I was promised. Instead, it’s a boring, poorly made, and uninteresting journey that has a sickly entertaining but ultimately flawed centipede sequence.
There was a great, fucked up movie somewhere in the last ten minutes, if only Tom Six had remembered the importance of the other 80% of the film.
