The first Human Centipede was a success, probably for the same reason that "2 Girls 1 Cup" could be considered a success. You make a movie that's about nothing but a guy sewing people's lips to anuses, and curious thrill-seekers will come, if only to see what it's all about. I was one of those thrill-seekers, and what it's all about turned out to be not all that much.
Now that we're on the verge of being subjected to a sequel, The Human Centipede Part 2 (Full Sequence), the British Board of Film Classification has offered what has turned out to be a de facto publicity boost to the film: they've banned it from release in the UK. An interview in last Sunday's New York Times reveals that the film's director, Tom Six, is only passively upset at the board's rejection. "My God, this is brilliant for the marketing," he says.
The Human Centipede 2 would be far from the first film to trumpet its censorship in other countries to boost ticket sales. It was 33 years ago that I Spit On Your Grave, a sadistic and artless rape-revenge dud, played the same card. Movie critics like Roger Ebert trashed it for being the cold, manipulative piece of waste that it was, and played right into its hand. It gained a cult following and even spawned a slick Hollywood remake last year.
The Human Centipede appears to be going for the same sadistic, gut-wrenching reaction, but the problem isn't that it's too sadistic, or too artless, or even too fetishistic. The problem is that it's its own Hollywood remake. Far from being a grainy, bargain-basement snuff film lite, The Human Centipede is beautifully shot, artfully created and designed, and boring. Though Ebert awarded the film zero stars, the same rating he gave to I Spit, he backhandedly praises Six's effort in making a proud midnight movie that avoids being purely an exploitation film.
The trailer for Part 2, though it occupies a different universe and a different style, looks to be just as Hollywood. The gorgeous black-and-white photography recalls an old Universal monster movie. Its new antihero--a stocky introvert played by Laurence R. Harvey--reminds us of Peter Lorre in M. This is far from a mere exploitation film; it looks as if Six is trying to elevate his crude premise into a real film.
And there's the problem. There's no room in the mouth-to-anus business for a real film. Just as the first Human Centipede spent too much time lingering on the existential pain and suffering of the six-legged creature at its center, Part 2 appears to be more a harrowing exploration into the mind of a tortured madman than a celebration of bodily invasion.
But reports do say that the film is much more disgusting than its predecessor. Though I do take issue with the notion of any film being banned by a country's government, the British Film Board is dead right in their description of the first film, which was given the OK for ages 18 and up: though "undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting, it was a relatively traditional and conventional horror film." The second, they say, is much more disgusting and may even put audiences at risk. At risk of what, I am not sure, other than flushing a hard-earned $10 down the toilet.
The idea of a film causing actual harm to a person watching it actually plays right into Six's hand as well. His sequel takes the meta route and sets itself in a world where The Human Centipede is a successful cult film, and inspires a sociopathic copycat to give the experiment a try. I had enough trouble believing that a sick Nazi doctor would be so dumb as to think an experiment like this would be worth anything. I, like the film board, was not too worried about it inspiring any copycats.
By going meta, Six takes a big risk. Audiences have not typically responded well to movies that turn mirrors on themselves and say, "Wow, aren't we great?" An audience is far more likely to take to a sequel that stays within its own universe. Look at how much money people have spent on the Saw series, or on Final Destination, or Friday the 13th.
And then look at how much money they spent on Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. That was an uncommonly intelligent sequel which took an entirely different approach from its wildly successful original. The Blair Witch Project was a monumental hit with a revolutionary marketing strategy, and a sequel was immediately called for. But rather than continue with their found-footage, lost-in-the-woods, documentary-like motif, the filmmakers hired Joe Berlinger, the documentarian behind Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, to make a traditional horror film set outside the realm of the original, in which Blair Witch was a cultural phenomenon and has inspired copycats to venture into the woods themselves.
Berlinger also raised questions about the idea of documentary footage itself. What happens when documented footage disagrees with real life? Does video lie? How can we ever know the truth? Interesting stuff. The movie tanked at the box office and killed the Blair Witch franchise.
It looks like Six is doing something along the same lines here. In doing so, he's giving himself far too much credit. Though The Human Centipede caused quite a stir upon its release, I can't say I've known anyone who's liked it, or even thought it sick and twisted enough to inspire a cult phenomenon. With its surprising lack of gore and artful treatment of its central creature, The Human Centipede just isn't strong enough to inspire a madman either. Of course, if the cultural and psychological subtext doesn't work, the sequel could simply fall back on the increase in blood, gore, and bodily terror. Will The Human Centipede 2 be disgusting and exploitative enough to redeem itself from his secretly highbrow intentions?
My vote would be no. Though Six appears to take glee in making audiences squirm, it looks to me like he's a closeted reputable filmmaker. He may be loath to admit it, but I think Six is probably going to make an actual good film someday. One where mouths and anuses can remain blissfully separate.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Shock and Yawn: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (2010)
The Human Centipede suffers from what psychologists call the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is the assumption that a certain event is likely or possible because of how easy it is to imagine. More and more movies suffer from it nowadays, especially as the increase in CGI makes more things that might be impossible in real life more likely on screen. Events are decided based on how easy the image is to put together, rather than how likely the event would be to happen. It’s easy to imagine Bruce Willis casually stepping out of a car that’s spinning out of control, like he does in RED, but not quite so plausible in real life.
It’s also easy to imagine a German scientist kidnapping tourists and sewing their lips to each other’s anuses to make one big long segmented animal. Disgusting, yes, but easy to imagine. That is the starting-off point for Tom Six’s (his real name) The Human Centipede. The trouble is that’s pretty much his ending point too.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, his real name) is quite a madman indeed. He introduces himself as Germany’s foremost surgeon for separating conjoined twins. Over the course of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), he kidnaps several people, sedates them, and when they wake up, they are joined together, one in front of the other. This explains why he was the conjoined twin guy and not a gastroenterologist.
It’s at this point that even the most sicko horror fan begins to ask what the point is. There really isn’t a whole lot of bodily terror in the film; there’s a lot more wincing and almost-vomiting to be done at the mere description of the premise than at anything that happens in the film. The scenes of the human centipede are filmed gingerly enough so that we’re sure that the actors aren’t being put through the same trials as the characters.
The grotesqueness of the premise has led some critics to compare Six to David Cronenberg. Let it be known that Cronenberg’s superiority is not limited to number of syllables. While Cronenberg dealt with bodily invasion just as gleefully, many of his films were political and social allegories that used their gore to make a point.
Six hints that he’s going to go there at times. Early in the film, one character has a chance to kill herself rather than go through such a horrible experience; this might have posed the question of at which point life becomes not worth saving. The fusing of three people together might have made an interesting allegory about loss of individuality; what happens when you, formerly a human being, are now just a cog in a larger organism and have to do your part to make it work? You don’t have to look too deep to see the parallels to Communism.
For the most part, Six is content to stick with the old Friday the 13th formula. Hapless victims get lost in the woods, are preyed upon by a maniac, try to escape to no avail, are tortured. The end. The problem with the film isn’t that Six has no boundaries and pushes the envelope too far; rather, it’s that he’s too Hollywood to do anything interesting with the film. His Human Centipede is at heart the same as any paint-by-numbers big-studio flick that takes a grabber of a premise and leaves it to die.
The production is slickly made and extremely well-shot for what it is. Six and cinematographer Goof de Koning (his real name) make Dr. Heiter’s house into a living, breathing, antibacterial nightmare with long constrictive corridors and very few windows. Six stages several very effective chase scenes all within those walls: no easy feat.
Mr. Laser, who looks like Christopher Walken with a facelift, plays Dr. Heiter as well as he can under the circumstances, though the role is really impossible to play. How to play a man so dementedly brilliant, yet so stupid that he doesn’t realize why the back end of the centipede is going to die of dysentery eventually? Why wouldn’t he realize that a human centipede is no good if the front segment is the only one that survives? Most mad scientists have a madness that speaks to their purpose.
The three segments of the centipede—Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, and Ashlynn Yennie, in that order—are completely believable. All Kitamura has to do as the centipede’s head is scream epithets in Japanese. Well, what would you do if you were the head of a human centipede and spoke only Japanese?
Six is not an untalented director, and I suspect he may have a future making normal films. His path will probably follow that of John Waters, who started out making trash and graduated to some truly great (if not completely untrashy) films. The Human Centipede is Six’s Pink Flamingos, and now that he’s gotten everyone’s attention he will move on to better things, like... let me check... The Human Centipede 2. So there you go.
* 1/2 out of ****
It’s also easy to imagine a German scientist kidnapping tourists and sewing their lips to each other’s anuses to make one big long segmented animal. Disgusting, yes, but easy to imagine. That is the starting-off point for Tom Six’s (his real name) The Human Centipede. The trouble is that’s pretty much his ending point too.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, his real name) is quite a madman indeed. He introduces himself as Germany’s foremost surgeon for separating conjoined twins. Over the course of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), he kidnaps several people, sedates them, and when they wake up, they are joined together, one in front of the other. This explains why he was the conjoined twin guy and not a gastroenterologist.
It’s at this point that even the most sicko horror fan begins to ask what the point is. There really isn’t a whole lot of bodily terror in the film; there’s a lot more wincing and almost-vomiting to be done at the mere description of the premise than at anything that happens in the film. The scenes of the human centipede are filmed gingerly enough so that we’re sure that the actors aren’t being put through the same trials as the characters.
The grotesqueness of the premise has led some critics to compare Six to David Cronenberg. Let it be known that Cronenberg’s superiority is not limited to number of syllables. While Cronenberg dealt with bodily invasion just as gleefully, many of his films were political and social allegories that used their gore to make a point.
Six hints that he’s going to go there at times. Early in the film, one character has a chance to kill herself rather than go through such a horrible experience; this might have posed the question of at which point life becomes not worth saving. The fusing of three people together might have made an interesting allegory about loss of individuality; what happens when you, formerly a human being, are now just a cog in a larger organism and have to do your part to make it work? You don’t have to look too deep to see the parallels to Communism.
For the most part, Six is content to stick with the old Friday the 13th formula. Hapless victims get lost in the woods, are preyed upon by a maniac, try to escape to no avail, are tortured. The end. The problem with the film isn’t that Six has no boundaries and pushes the envelope too far; rather, it’s that he’s too Hollywood to do anything interesting with the film. His Human Centipede is at heart the same as any paint-by-numbers big-studio flick that takes a grabber of a premise and leaves it to die.
The production is slickly made and extremely well-shot for what it is. Six and cinematographer Goof de Koning (his real name) make Dr. Heiter’s house into a living, breathing, antibacterial nightmare with long constrictive corridors and very few windows. Six stages several very effective chase scenes all within those walls: no easy feat.
Mr. Laser, who looks like Christopher Walken with a facelift, plays Dr. Heiter as well as he can under the circumstances, though the role is really impossible to play. How to play a man so dementedly brilliant, yet so stupid that he doesn’t realize why the back end of the centipede is going to die of dysentery eventually? Why wouldn’t he realize that a human centipede is no good if the front segment is the only one that survives? Most mad scientists have a madness that speaks to their purpose.
The three segments of the centipede—Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, and Ashlynn Yennie, in that order—are completely believable. All Kitamura has to do as the centipede’s head is scream epithets in Japanese. Well, what would you do if you were the head of a human centipede and spoke only Japanese?
Six is not an untalented director, and I suspect he may have a future making normal films. His path will probably follow that of John Waters, who started out making trash and graduated to some truly great (if not completely untrashy) films. The Human Centipede is Six’s Pink Flamingos, and now that he’s gotten everyone’s attention he will move on to better things, like... let me check... The Human Centipede 2. So there you go.
* 1/2 out of ****
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Helplessness Blues: Steven Soderbergh's CONTAGION (2011)
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion starts out as the kind of epic thriller that was Irwin Allen's specialty: a large-scale disaster unites a team of big movie stars who work together to fix it. It ends, however, with a sincere plea for order and patience in a world of chaos and mistrust. The movie tracks the global spread of a fatal disease, but at the outset a plague of cynicism has already taken its toll.
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
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