The Human Centipede
(First Sequence)
Every so
often a film comes along that gets the collective knickers of the chattering
classes in a twist. It’ll be controversial, taboo, dangerous. Usually it’s violent, often it’s sexually explicit. The Daily Mail will hate it. A certain type of filmgoer (almost
exclusively young
and male) will
speak of it in hushed tones. It’ll be talked about around water coolers and you
won’t be able to get to the bar in your local pub for people trying to sell you
a pirated DVD of it. Watching it will become almost a rite of passage; all
the cool kids have seen it.
It might be
a horror film; a sleek engine of terror like the original Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. It might
be torture-porn like Hostel or the Saw films. It could push the boundaries of explicit sexuality in
mainstream cinema like In The Realm Of The Senses, Last Tango In Paris, 9 Songs or the films of Catherine Breillat
(Romance, Anatomy
of Hell). It could
be Lars von Trier’s latest exercise in rampant misogyny (Anti-Christ). It could be pretty much anything
by Takashi Miike. Every so often it’s something genuinely transgressive and
disturbing like Baise-Moi, Irreversible or The Isle. Sometimes it’s just a wallow in the depths of human
depravity. This year there’s already two contenders that have got the hearts of
the world’s Internet geeks all aflutter; A Serbian Film and The Human Centipede (First
Sequence).
While A
Serbian Movie (the Citizen
Kane of
snuff-themed movies) struggles to find a certificate, The Human Centipede
(First Sequence) is
off the starting blocks like Usain Bolt and will do for the girlie trip to
Europe, well, pretty much what Hostel did for Eastern European sex tourism. Kill it stone
dead. Two pretty
but dumb
American girls holidaying in Germany, Lyndsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny
(Ashlynn Yennie), get lost on the way to a party and, when their car loses a tyre, are
forced to take refuge at the home of retired surgeon, dog lover and barking mad scientist Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser). A nice
soothing glass of rohypnol later and the girls wake up to find themselves tied to hospital
beds in the good doctor’s basement as he explains his plan to connect the girls and a male Japanese
tourist via their digestive systems (yup folks, ass-to-mouth), stitching them together to create
his very own Siamese triplet, (drumroll puh-lease) the ‘Human Centipede!’
Unless
you’ve been in a coma for the last couple of months or just haven’t bothered
reading the preceding paragraphs, it’ll come as no surprise that The Human
Centipede is far
from a subtle film. Apparently born of a drunken conversation Dutch
writer/director Tom Six had with friends about the most fitting punishment for
a child molester (to have their mouth sewn to a trucker’s anus), what’s
surprising is just how coy, how tasteful the film actually is. Once you get
past the essential ‘yeuchness’ of the central conceit, The Human Centipede is actually a pretty restrained
exercise in sustained tension. Gore hounds will be sorely disappointed; apart from some throb-inducing
amateur dentistry
and a few explicit surgical scenes as Heiter sews his victims together, The Human Centipede is rather light on the expected blood and guts
torture scenes horror fans have come to expect, deriving much of its ‘pleasure’
instead from the excruciating, escalating perversity of the situation.
From the
opening scene the film creates an atmosphere of dread and dislocation. The world the girls move through
is an anonymous
one of soulless corporate
hotels and disposable rental cars before eventually finding themselves trapped in Heiter’s IKEA
show-home. With
almost the entire film confined to the house, a neat freak’s lair of clean,
sleek lines, tasteful soft furnishings and minimalist decor (sterile operating theatre cum dungeon optional), Six ratchets up the tension and claustrophobia to stifling levels, playing a game of cat and
mouse with his audience in much the same way as Heiter plays with Lyndsay, the feistier of the pair, whose desperate escape attempt ends in failure. The scene in which Heiter traps
the terrified girl in his swimming pool and merely waits for her to surface for air so he can shoot her with a
tranquiliser will have you squirming in your seat.
A horror
movie for the Two Girls, One Cup generation, The Human Centipede may be the kinkiest mainstream (or at least
above-ground) movie since 2002’s Secretary. While the nudity is surprisingly non-sexual, Laser’s Dr Heiter and director Six
take a leering
delight in the more fetishistic aspects of the film with Heiter strutting around in jackboots with a riding crop as he ‘trains’ his new pet, administering a sound thrashing when his victims disobey him. Inevitably, nature must take
its course and, when the gross-out moment we’ve all been waiting for finally
comes (and you know what moment I mean, don’t try to deny it), it’s surprisingly tasteful (well, as tasteful as shitting in a
woman’s mouth can be), restrained even, with Six implying the full retch-inducing horror of what’s occurring through
Lyndsay’s tortured
reaction rather than through fountains of scatological filth. Coprophiliacs and BDSM aficionados
should book their tickets now.
Looking
like the stillborn
fruit of the unholy union of Christopher Walken and Udo Kier, Dieter Laser as the mad
doctor delivers a performance of such camp, mannered eye-rolling insanity that you find yourself wondering if
he’s actually acting or was just a passing sexual pervert. His ecstatic gasp of release upon beholding his creation for the
first time is both chilling and prompts nervous laughter; I wouldn’t want to have been
the wardrobe mistress on that film as I’m pretty sure they had to chisel Laser out of his underpants at the
end of each day. As the head of the centipede, Akihiro Kitamura’s performance is
perfectly judged, humour tempering his justifiable outrage and providing some of
the films most intentionally funny moments. But the best performance in the
film is that of Ashley C. Williams, the fiestier of the two female victims and
the middle segment of the centipede. She takes the bare bones of her character
and puts flesh and blood on it, her expressions and body language far more eloquent than the mediocre
dialogue she’s forced to deliver in the first half of the film.
While there
is a worrying streak of misogyny running through the film, after all only the women are made
to eat excrement
and have their faces sliced and sutured, The Human Centipede is that rare beast; a gross-out, slice of
reprehensible torture-porn that actually dares to humanise its victims whilst overtly implicating the audience making it probably the
most scopophilic exercise
in mainstream cinema since Psycho. At the beginning of the film we want, we need something nasty to happen to
the female leads. They are every brash stereotype of the ignorant
American abroad that we Europeans have loved to hate since WW2. They’re stupid,
they’re smug. Their faces are blandly perfect, their bodies tight and athletic.
Who wouldn’t hate them? And then the something nasty happens. Deprived of speech (their voices are
like nails on a blackboard), their silent suffering elevates their characters beyond
the walking chalk out-line victims they were before and humanises. The scene
where the two girls desperately search for each others hands, establishing the
simple comfort of human contact, is devastating and almost too painful to watch.
It’s the intelligence and restraint of moments like this that raises The
Human Centipede above
movies like Hostel
or Saw.
The posters
and trailers for the film may trumpet that its “100% Medically Accurate” but
it’s worth remembering that director Tom Six was one of the creators of the
original Dutch Big Brother. Just think how much better the show would be if this year’s
crop of half-wits had been sewn together in a daisy-chain and forced to eat
each other’s excrement. A nasty, warped, little fantasy, The Human Centipede is a difficult film to watch and a
harder one to recommend but if you don’t see it you’ll never be able to boast
about seeing it.
David Watson
Director
Tom Six
Cast
Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie,
Akihiro Kitamura, Andreas Leupold
Country
UK & Netherlands
Writer
Tom Six
Running time
92min
Year
2009
Certificate
18
UK Release Date
20 August 2010
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