Imagine one of the worst situations you could be in, and chances are your imagination wouldn’t go as low as Tom Six’s The Human Centipede. Although it borrows some tropes from 1950s-era body horror films, this one slops around in a league of its own.
The Human Centipede‘s premise is very simple and very gory. A mad German surgeon, Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser, whose looks every bit the part… almost too well), who’s renown for separating conjoined twins, kidnaps a group of people, including two American female tourists: Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams), Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) with the goal of conjoining three individuals in order to create a new “species”.
What makes this particularly disturbing is the manner in which they’re joined: a linear, gastric conjoinment in which the “lead” (Katsuro [Akihiro Kitamura]) acts as the mouth of this grotesque trio, meaning he’s their only source of sustenance, because (and this is where things get really gross), his excrement is fed into the “middle’s” mouth, which Laser surgically alters and attaches to Katsuro’s anus, similar to the “end”, who excretes the final product.
Because of the simplicity of the plot, one wonders if Six simply had an image of the monstrous “centipede” and then wrote a basic script to eventually realize this image on the silver screen.
Heiter can be compared to Victor Frankenstein in his longing to play God, but unlike Frankenstein, Six provides Heiter with no other motivation. He’s simply insane. Similarly, one can see the influence of films such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, in which traveling, inept Americans (who, of course, find themselves with car trouble) unwittingly find themselves the subjects of horrific mutilation.
The holes in The Human Centipede‘s plot are cavernous. For example, it’s not made clear how the three who are one can obtain liquid sustenance.
Additionally, the linearity (of plot and centipede) reinforces this as yet another masculine-dominated exercise. Power rests with the male doctor, using his female subjects for his own whim. The victimized women are easily subdued, and even when it comes to the actual human centipede, the sole male is head, giving him a voice. He is not going to have to eat shit like his silenced female cohort.
Essentially, this can best be described as lazy filmmaking. The characters are flat, the acting is sometimes over-the-top, but usually forgettable, and the plot is just an exercise in rehashing old movie stereotypes. Not even the special effects are that superb. For such a grotesque film, one would expect to observe the surgery, and throughout the film, the critical “point” of the centipede is masked by bandages.
The title of the film is The Human Centipede: The First Segment, which has already generated somewhat of a cult following, suggesting more “segments” are on their way. One can only hope that now that the generic elements have already been used, the next film(s) will prove a little more innovative. However, as the saying goes, hope in one hand, shit in the other, and see which fills first.