The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

Two pretty but ditsy American girls are on a road trip through Europe. In Germany, they end up alone at night with a broken car in the woods. They search for help and find an isolated villa. The next day, they awaken to find themselves trapped in a terrifying makeshift basement hospital along with a Japanese man. An older German man identifies himself as a retired surgeon specialized in separating Siamese twins. However, his three “patients” are not about to be separated but joined together in a horrific operation. He plans to be the first person to connect people via their gastric systems. By doing so, he plans to bring to life his sick lifetime fantasy, the human centipede.

It’s not often that I have such mixed feelings about a movie. The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is both perfect and flawed. It is a movie that takes a horrible yet fairly laughable (and as far as I can tell, completely original) concept and treats it with the most absolute solemn and serious reverence. Were this movie handled with anything less than graceful maturity and masterful skill, it would have fallen into self-effacing parody and devolved into a run-of-the-mill gross-out that hoped to get by on its unique and controversial concept alone. But Human Centipede (First Sequence) stays the course, navigating between pompousness and cheesiness to emerge safely without crashing into either.

A big part of the credit for pulling this off goes to Dieter Laser, (I would kill for that name!), who plays the mad Doctor Heiter. (“Mad” being a gross understatement.) This man does an incredible acting job. He blew me away. He is fucking creepy as hell, but in a very real and human way. Dieter Laser is to mad doctors what Marlon Brando is to mafia gangsters. I can not imagine anyone else performing this role. Anyways, Doctor Heiter is obsessed with surgically grafting creatures together, one by one in a row, on hands and knees, mouth to anus to form one continuous digestive tract, with the end result of forming a “centipede”. He first achieves this feat with his pet dogs, but when they die, he sets his sights on creating… you guessed it… a human centipede. To this end he abducts several people, tests them for compatibility, and finally uses the best specimens to assemble his monstrosity.

As for the rest of the cast, they carry their own weight, though most of their roles consist of crawling around on all fours and whimpering or screaming, which is muffled by the fact that their mouth has been grafted onto the preceding person’s anus. Only the “leader” of the centipede has his mouth free, and he uses it to shout expletives and empty threats at Doctor Heiter while he is being whipped with a riding crop and taught to fetch papers like the Doctor’s beloved dog centipede used to do.

Even though this movie did not go before the MPAA and did not receive a wide release, it has got a lot of people talking, and a lot of people seeing it. Its popularity practically exploded based on word of mouth alone. But is that because its truly a great movie, or because the concept is just so shocking and controversial? Roger Ebert wrote: “I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film.” …and… “No horror film I’ve seen inflicts more terrible things on its victims than The Human Centipede.” But Ebert also states: “And yet within [director] Six, there stirs the soul of a dark artist.” Obviously Ebert is experiencing the same conflicted feelings about the film that I am, and probably just about every other moviegoer is, too.

So where exactly does the movie falter? If you are someone who doesn’t consider the entire premise to be a negative, that is? Well, for one, the pace is excruciatingly slow. For two, the plot is fairly predictable. It is also riddled with clichés, such as victims who get a flat tire in the middle of the night and wander into the woods for help rather than walking along the road, and of course the aforementioned evil German mad scientist (although he may be the best evil German mad scientist ever). There are also scenes that seem very unrealistic and disjoint, such as the scene where the doctor walks around with a tranquilizer gun at a fairly crowded rest stop, tranqs a man as he’s getting ready to take a dump, and then drags him to his car without anyone noticing. Or a scene where, after establishing that the doctor must scientifically test subjects for compatibility, he simply assumes two policemen to be suitable subjects for grafting without testing them first. And finally, even though I have already complimented everyone involved for treating the movie with absolute straight-faced seriousness, it was really hard for me not to laugh at how pitiful and perverse the human centipede was. The whole time I was just imagining how long the blooper reel must be, full of scenes where the actors’ tears turn to uncontrollable laughter as they realize what a batshit insane crazy movie they are making. But in the end, I’m really glad they made it.

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Posted in: Horror Movies »  by: Morbidementia

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