In an era where violence has reached an all-time gratuitous high in cultural media like movies and television, there is some validity to the notion that every generation has become more desensitized to brutality and obscenity in entertainment than the last. After all, a little film called Gone With the Wind engendered massive controversy when Clark Gable uttered the word "damn" in the movie's classic finale. And that was in 1939.
But with the increasingly lax censorship in movies over the following decades, it became much more difficult to shock the audience. This was especially true with horror movies. Over thirty years ago, the vomit-spewing chills of The Exorcist gave the audience nightmares for days afterwards. Now, modern viewers would cynically scoff at how it's supposedly "not scary". In 1984, the moviegoing public was easily freaked out by the bloody antics of Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Today, an unnecessary amount of sequels (and a reboot) have eliminated the original's novelty and primary source of terror. What's worse, audiences nowadays just settle for shallow, gore-heavy "torture porn" that does away with psychological horror (and a decent plot) and merely throws guts and viscera at us consistently for 90 minutes.
But despite the current dearth of horror movies that fail to grab ahold of our psyche and help reveal our hidden fears (not to mention provide an engaging and three-dimensional story), there are always some films that manage to slip through the cracks and do just that. There was the hugely successful low-budget mock-documentary The Blair Witch Project, the spooky 2001 psychological thriller The Others, the 2004 remake of the pioneering zombie film Dawn of the Dead, and the terrific Swedish vampire drama Let the Right One In.
Then in 2009, avant-garde director Lars von Trier released a highly (and rightfully) controversial picture called Antichrist. Widely considered to be one of the most disturbing movies ever made, Antichrist (despite getting mixed reviews, including from yours truly) made good on its surreal and explicit premise, combining shock value and cerebral mindfuckery to elicit the emotional and visceral reaction horror flicks are meant to create.
But now it seems as though von Trier's film may have stiff competition in the "Oh-My-God-What-The-Fuck-Am-I-Watching" department with the release of Dutch filmmaker Tom Six's The Human Centipede, a revolting, stomach-churning body-horror extravaganza with an ultimately ambiguous narrative purpose.
In Germany, American friends Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) and Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) are touring the country, and experience a flat tire at night in the middle of nowhere. The two girls are encountered by a stoic and disconcerting man named Dr. Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser), who shelters them in his house and allegedly arranges for the rental car service to pick them up. What the women don't realize is that the doctor has drugged their water, and the two black out.
They awake in Heiter's basement, strapped onto hospital cots, where they discover that they're being held captive alongside a trucker (Rene de Wit). The doctor ominously states that the trucker "isn't a match", and murders him in front of the terrified women with a poisonous IV injection. After being drugged again, Jenny and Lindsay reawaken to see that the trucker's been replaced with Japanese tourist Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura).
The twisted Heiter explains to his three prisoners that though he's acclaimed for his work in separating Siamese twins, he truly desires to engineer the exact opposite: a "human centipede", where three humans are stitched together mouth-to-anus, sharing a single digestive tract.
If that last paragraph doesn't sicken you, I don't know what will. The very premise of the film merely written on paper is nauseating, and it's certainly high-concept in the most extreme fashion. I will give director Six props for crafting a premise that's wholly original in a day and age where horror movie plots are dreadfully similar and lacking in originality. After all, how often do we NOT see a fright flick where a masked killer or monster stalks and butchers scores of vapid, horny teenagers?
But like those films, The Human Centipede fails to help us connect with the poor souls forced to participate in this horrific experiment. The characters played by Yennie and Williams are one-dimensional, made worse by the fact that they're unable to speak for the entire second half of the film (aside from muffled screaming and sobbing). As the front "segment" of this "centipede", Kitamura has a slightly meatier role, but that's not saying much.
In fact, the obvious scene-stealer is German actor Dieter Laser as the sociopathic surgeon who commits such an unspeakable act. Devoid of emotion or sympathy and single-mindedly obsessed with committing a medical breakthrough, Laser's Dr. Heiter is an effectively creepy villain.
His actions could easily be interpreted as a commentary on the sadistic medical experiments performed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, but as a whole, it's difficult to determine if there's any subtext present at all. The film may be Cronenbergian in an aesthetic sense, but it lacks the underlying social critiques that David Cronenberg snuck into his equally disturbing movies such as The Fly and Naked Lunch.
If Centipede has anything in its favor, it wisely uses obstructive camerawork most of the time to stray from the explicit imagery of the human monstrosity on display, instead relying on making the audience use their imagination vividly. Just hearing Dr. Heiter explain to his future victims, in full medical detail, as to how he'll perform the procedure is repulsive enough to merit a use of a barf bag.
In all fairness, The Human Centipede was clearly tailor-made to be a future cult hit. The title and premise alone guarantee that subtlety and finesse will be thrown out the window, and it's surreal enough to assure that it'll earn a place in midnight movie circuits across the country. But the film's biggest flaw (ass-to-mouth-stitching-concept notwithstanding) is that it's not really that novel, and is surprisingly conventional in its execution, despite seemingly trying to be different in a crowd of horror movies that are all too similar, and the attempts at sick humor usually falls flat due to the concurrent usage of serious dramatic terror.
But if Six's primary intention was to just gross us out, then he succeeded wildly. Disgusting, stomach-churning, and completely lacking in any sense of decency or visually conservative principles (but a must-see for the strong-stomached and coprophagia aficionados), The Human Centipede is certainly one-of-a-kind amongst its terrifying cinematic brethren, but whether or not this is ultimately a good thing is anyone's guess.
Letter Grade: "C-"
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