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 ****
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