By Chris Rennirt
For anyone who hasn’t seen The Human Centipede (First Sequence), and may want to see it, read no further! THERE ARE BIG SPOILERS AHEAD! Though the movie was released 17 years ago (as of the writing of this article), I just got around to watching it last night. “How could a fan of extreme horror skip a film of such depravity so long?” you ask. The answer is simple, albeit unbelievable: “I don’t know.” Somehow, it got lost amongst all the other unwatched movies I have, bought reflexively, way back, stuck on a shelf and forgotten.
But alas, last night was the night. I watched it. Is it all that? Does it measure up to the hype I remember when first released? Is it the most disgusting example of anally-induced horror ever taken from the toilet to the big screen? NO! So, rather than a review, this is more of a rant, 17 years late, but better late than never. Whereas most movies move me to review them because of their mostly positive qualities, this one moves me for the opposite of reasons–its mostly (near totally) negative abominations of the genre and movie-making in general.
What’s better than victims who show up wet and clueless?
And why is The Human Centipede (First Sequence) NOT the movie it damn well should be! Afterall, with a title like “The Human Centipede,” a storyline that’s exactly what you think, and an “unrated” version released, there is no reason for the movie to be anything but disgusting, at even record-setting levels. Without pushing the limits of gore and disgust, a movie like this has no reason to exist. Instead, it was as if the whole movie was just a vehicle to present “The Human Centipede,” visually, for its shock value alone, with no intelligent and/or engaging story to support it. “Here it is! Look at it, and be disgusted and repulsed,” I could almost hear the writer and director saying…or perhaps yelling with futility at audiences only shrugging their shoulders…audiences saying (or also yelling), “Is that all there is?”
Never accept a drink from a stranger, especially when he looks like a mad scientist!
What’s worse, as a failure for a film of any genre, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) has NO plot! We have, simply, a fast setup for the predictable events leading only to the film’s highlighted abominations. And what’s that, in a nutshell (as it takes only a nutshell here, literally)? Two young women have car trouble on an isolated road in Germany, in the dead of night, in the middle of a forest. The first to stop his car and just look at them is a pervert who makes jokes about “fucking” them, as they ignorantly listen to him speaking in German. Shortly (actually stupidly fast) after the pervert leaves, the two young women decide to trek off into the forest in search of help. (Great idea, right?) But what luck! They see the lights of a house in the distance. And, you guessed, just as I did; it’s the house of the demented Dr. Heiter, who just happens to need a couple of witless young women for his experiments! And thus begins a most pathetically-contrived story, lacking the most minimal plot or effort to achieve one!
If ever there was a stereotype evil doctor with a God complex, Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) is it!
What’s more, it’s as if the writer and director worked hard to see how many missed opportunities they could accumulate in a single movie. “What opportunities?” you ask. In a movie where people are mutilated, sewn together mouth to ass, and made to crawl on the floor like slaves for a fetishist of medical perversity, we actually see little of the details. With surgery of such complexity and cruelty (as the linchpin of the movie’s purpose), we only see the doctor explaining a diagram of what will be done. No sooner than we expect epic gore, we get only a montage of quick, off-screen surgery instead–save for a few flaps of ass flesh, shown at a very view-limiting angle. The majority of what is seen is actually pre-surgical, showing the doctor drawing cut lines on a victim’s face with markers. “How terrifying and graphic that is,” I say with NO seriousness and tons of sarcasm.
Yes, let’s examine those lips you’ll no longer be needing!
Before you say, “For God’s sake, how much do you really want to see of human mouths being sewn to asses?” “Are you a depraved psycho-sadist yourself, with delusions of medical grandiosity, or just as bad (almost) a horror fan who lives out his sick alter-ego dreams, watching medical horror with gratuitous gore?” HELL NO! If you are really asking that question, you aren’t really a fan of extreme horror…or perhaps not a fan of horror at all. I’m just an average lover of hardcore horror and gore, expecting a movie titled The Human Centipede to deliver on its story, the extremities of depravity it touts, and the “unrated version” it presents. Without all the former, I must stress, this movie has no other reason to exist. It is otherwise a film with no plot; it is a film with only a premise–a demented doctor planning and making human abominations, with three undeveloped characters we care nothing about, used as victim fodder for the carnage. With the aforementioned, physical elements of extreme horror (even without a plot), The Human Centipede might have at least achieved cult-film status for those elements alone. INSTEAD, it has not even the basics, and achieves nothing!
Does it get worse? If not worse, it gets just as bad for another reason. Far too much time, nearly a third of the movie, is spent on one of the doctor’s victims, and her 100% predictable, failed attempt at escaping. You’d have to be stupid (without even a single brain cell) to think the girl will really escape, a third of the way into the movie, when she is one of three people required for the operation, and there is, logically, no time left to find another victim. The whole scene is, in fact, so predictable that it adds nothing to the movie, and there is no need to include it–other than, perhaps, to add running time to a movie that had nothing else of value to add. Ironically, however, this useless scene contained more action and attempted suspense than any of the other, arguably integral parts of the film. Removing the escape scene would have at least spared viewers a half hour of wasting one’s life watching it, cutting the total time wasting one’s life watching the movie down to about an hour!
Does it get even worse in the end? YES! Believe it or not, it does, most profoundly, possibly even outdoing all else, as a finale of incompetent writing! “What in the name of God could be worse than everything you’ve so graphically described, so far?” you ask. If ever there was a time–a hard slap-in-the-face moment–for horror victims to make double-damn sure the psycho doctor is dead, when they have every opportunity to do so, it is near the end of The Human Centipede! BUT, do the desperate, medically-tortured victims do this? NO! After Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) is stabbed in the leg with a scalpel and falls down, immobilized and mentally out, right next to the man who’s the first part of “The Human Centipede,” does the man quadruple, triple, or at least double tap the doctor to be certain he’s dead? Does he beat his head to a bloody, surely-dead pulp in this moment? Better yet, does he remove the scalpel from the doctor’s leg–which is well within reach–and stab him repeatedly until he bleeds to death and breathes no more? Or, best of all, does he use the scalpel to behead the doctor (or at least cut his throat to the bone), as anyone made into a human centipede would be angry enough to do? HELL NO! Does he instead crawl away, slowly, dragging his two anally-attached companions with him, bleeding, in agony, up a flight of stairs, with futility, surely knowing the doctor is not dead and will be after them again? HELL YES! It was, at this point, that the movie was almost too frustrating to for me to continue, as I cursed at the screen, regretting the 92 minutes of life robbed from me forever! And with this, and this abominable failure of a horror film, I am reminded of a fitting quote from my favorite of movie critics…Roger Ebert. It’s a quote from Roger, responding to his TV-show review partner, Gene Siskel, when he said he actually felt like quitting his job as a film critic after watching She’s Out of Control (1989), because he felt that the movies had “abandoned him,” with the movie being so bad.
“You know people probably think you’re joking when you say you were really thinking of quitting your job. But I know what you felt, because I sat there, and I thought life is precious, life is short, and the idiots who made this film are taking two hours of my life and robbing it from me, in order to give me less than nothing. I mean a movie like this is a crime, because what it does is it robs life from people by requiring them to spend two hours to have such a terrible experience happen to them. I want my life back.” ~ Roger Ebert (describing his reaction to the movie She’s Out of Control/1989)
With tongue placed firmly “in cheek,” I will end this rant on a fair and positive note, giving credit where it is due. Acting by all involved is excellent, although wasted in a hopeless film that nothing can save. And, there is but one moment in The Human Centipede (First Sequence) where the movie delivers a taste (pun intended) of the gratuitous depravity it promises, with an isolated serving of pitch-black, truly anal humor. This is when the character Katsuro (the Japanese man at the front of the human centipede) shouts “Oh shit! I have to shit!” As the front segment of the centipede, Katsuro is the only one whose mouth is not sewn to another person’s anus, allowing him to speak. He yells this just before defecating, which leads to the middle person in the chain being forced to ingest his waste. Before this, Katsuro gives a heartfelt apology to the women behind him, but cannot stop the bowel movement. The sound of the woman retching as she swallows adds strong, vicariously felt horror, sadly never matched again. Aside from this–here measuring up to its title and touting, albeit disgusting and repulsive–like Roger Ebert, “I want my life back!”
No sooner than I compliment the movie for delivering anal waste to the mouth of a victim on-screen, I must recall a bit of even that compliment. It is, I think, more than a coincidence that the man at the front of the centipede chain who shouts, “Oh shit! I have to shit!” is Japanese and speaks no English. Since he speaks in Japanese, his lines are subtitled. In a film produced in English, having such impactful lines delivered via subtitles seems an intentional way to avoid it being said directly–an intentional way to buffer the impact and depravity of it all…unless you are Japanese! Thus, the movie wimps out again on delivering the goods. To expand on what Ebert said, in ending this toilet-themed tirade of cinematic travesties (and to compensate for a rant I was compelled to compose), “I want [even more of] my life back!” And like Ebert, I refuse to even give this one a Rocket Rating–not even a zero! While I, in no way, believe Roger Ebert would have all of the same reasons for applying his quote (or desire for returned time) to this movie specifically, I totally relate to his feelings about movies robbing us of time, NOT delivering a single element of what makes them worth even a single viewing. However, considering that Roger gave the movie 0 (ZERO) stars in his 2010 review, it is clear that we agree on at least one important, conclusion: THIS MOVIE SUCKS!
Included below is the trailer, mostly for consistency. BUTT, don’t let it fool you!
Chris Rennirt is a movie critic and writer in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as editor in chief at Space Jockey Reviews. He has been a judge at many film festivals, including Macabre Faire Film Festival and Crimson Screen Film Fest, and he attends horror and sci-fi conventions often. Chris’ movie reviews, articles, and interviews appear in Effective Magazine and are published regularly on Space Jockey Reviews.