Review: Human Centipede

American girls in Germany (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) find themselves in need of roadside assistance when their car breaks down on their way to a party. Eventually they decide to walk to someone’s house and make a phone call, and this leads them to the premises of a serious-looking man named Dr. Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser). He’s not terribly helpful, though. In fact, he’s incredibly messed-up in the head and after drugging a glass of water given to the girls, he has forced them to take part in his bizarro surgical procedures. The goal? To create a perfect ‘human centipede’. And how is this achieved? Let’s just say you definitely don’t want to be the middle part. Eeeewwwww. Akihiro Kitamura plays the third ‘part’ of the human centipede.

 

Oh boy. So it’s come to this. Bring that I don’t much like the torture porn side of horror, I knew going into this notorious 2009 film from-writer director Tom Six that I wouldn’t like it. What I didn’t know at the time was that...frankly, I don’t even think it’s really a movie. Or has a damn point to it.

 

Dieter Laser (who looks like a cross between Jean-Claude Van Damme and Scott Glenn) is fantastically cold-blooded and weird, so it’s a shame that his services are wasted in a single-minded non-film that features more heavy-breathing than in some pornos. And what’s the point? OK, you can create a human centipede. So? What for? It’s a fundamental flaw because even madmen have a rationale for what they do, even if it only makes sense to them. Here we get absolutely nothing.

 

And for a film that was supposed to be offensive and disgusting, not only do you see a whole lot less than your mind probably makes you think, but when you see the human centipede, it looks so incredibly absurd and fake that it’s not particularly disturbing. This is a stupid idea for a film, born, apparently, out of a joke the director made with friends about what to do with child molesters. Think about that, people! (John Waters’ infamous “Pink Flamingos” surely had to have been an inspiration, too). I wasn’t offended, just bored out of my mind. Usually when films have very little plot, they’ll compensate with action, comedy, or sex...gore even. But torture and medical procedures? No thanks.

 

I’m not going to call this film an abomination, it’s just not really much of a film, and certainly not interesting outside of Laser’s performance. Who the hell thought this would be an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes? How in the hell did they get sequels out of this thimble of an idea? There’s something actually quite infantile about the whole thing, when you think about it.

 

Rating: D-