Review by Justin Bateman
Stars Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie,
Akihiro Kitamura, Andreas Leupold, Peter Blankenstein,
Bernd Kostrau, Rene de Wit
Written by Tom Six
Certification UK 18 | US R
Runtime 92 minutes
Directed by Tom Six
Lindsay (Williams) and Jenny (Yennie) are two American girls travelling around Europe, when their car breaks down in the middle of the woods in Germany. Unable to get a phone signal and with the weather taking a turn for the worse, the girls walk until they find a house. Unfortunately for them, the house they find belongs to the decidedly odd Dr Heiter (Laser) who wastes no time in drugging them for his own twisted purposes.
Dutch director Tom Six has revealed that the idea for The Human Centipede – connecting three people together in a line, mouth to anus to create a sort of Siamese triplet with a single digestive system – came about when discussing a suitable punishment for paedophiles. It’s a pretty disgusting idea and watching this film it’s hard not to think that’s just how it should have stayed – as an idea, a sick joke amongst friends. The Human Centipede is not a badly made movie per se, but since it doesn’t seem to have anything much to say it therefore feels a bit pointless.
Over recent years, horror movies have become more and more explicitly horrific. The so-called torture porn, the likes of Saw and Hostel, have had the more sensitive critics and viewers harking back to the days of the video nasty and naturally there are some filmmakers who feel as though they need to raise the shock bar. In this sense at least, Six has succeeded for The Human Centipede is at times distinctly uncomfortable to watch. Pushing boundaries is all well and good but does it always count as entertainment?
Perhaps more pertinent though is whether The Human Centipede works as a horror film and largely it doesn’t. Because of how the story pans out there is precious little in the way of suspense, which only really leaves the yucky stuff to create any sort of audience response. Another problem is that once the central idea is explained and then realised, nothing much happens and there’s not really anywhere for the story to go – or at least nowhere that isn’t fairly predictable.
These concerns aside, Six’s film is not completely without merit. It’s moodily shot, the minimalist incidental music is nicely creepy and Dieter Laser is gloriously over the top as the insane Dr Heiter. But he’s so over the top that he’s funny, which only goes to undermine any sense of threat. He’s also a bad guy with virtually no motivation – “I don’t like human beings” is as much as we’re given to understanding why he’s intent on playing god in this way – and in the end it’s not a good enough reason to engage the audience on anything beyond the purely visceral. So while The Human Centipede isn’t actually all that gory, it feels like little more than a novelty and something that might have been far more effective as a short than a full-length feature film.