The Human Centipede

Review by Jason Donner

My goodness.  What can be said about a motion picture opus like The Human Centipede?  What can honestly be said about a movie where three people are brought... uh... so close to each other in endless scenes of watery sad eyes, muffled crying, and an angry Asian gentlemen who gets to play the head of a mutated Halloween horse costume?  Honestly, children, I think I lack the words so I'll just borrow from one of the few people more talented than I...

Torture porn.

Yes, torture porn... it's all the things you love about porn but without the sex, nudity, naughtiness... actually, it's nothing like porn at all. 

This... I just don't have the words.

Before you take me for one of these crying tits who get upset anytime a murder is depicted on screen, you should know that I love horror and that I have admitted to loving movies that have been dubbed "torture porn" before.  I loved the two Hostel movies, I laughed my way through the Final Destination franchise, and I even enjoyed the seemingly endless string of Saw movies... for a while, at least.

The Human Centipede, like an ugly child, is just something that cannot be loved.

For those few of you out there who are fortunate enough not to know what The Human Centipede is, allow me to make the bright light of your life a little dimmer.  The Human Centipede is formed when three people are surgically attached.  Oh, no, dear friends... not at the hip or the head for that would be too merciful.  As I said above, they are attached mouth to anus, turning all three of them into a single digestive tract.  In other words, when person number one goes number two...  number two gets to feast on that number two with painful muffled and very annoying crying.  Number three gets the number two from number two.

Think about eating nothing but chocolate soft serve ice cream and Baby Ruths for the rest of your life and now, instead of tasty confections, imagine it's poop.

I'll give you a moment to cry over what little innocence you had left.

Why would these annoying people be subjected to this horrible fate?  A mad scientist, of course.  What could be his motivation?  Beats me... from what I made out of this movie, I think he did it simply because he wanted to.  For what end is a mystery -- this isn't exactly the kind of thing you would show off at a convention or even to neighbors who pop in for tea and then ask nonchalantly what that muffled crying and farting sound is.

I have tried -- believe me, I have tried very hard -- to find something, anything in this movie two merit it any special attention other than the shock factor which, frankly, grows tedious and boring the longer that this movie plays out.  The Human Centipede should be one of two things: entertaining and/or engaging and, on every level of either requirement, it just isn't.  Watching this movie is like watching a puppy drown or a kitten mewing from a live microwave.

There are no characters that warrant sympathy, there is no deep look into the human psyche, and the torture that these characters are forced to endure just isn't fun to watch.  This movie made me feel uncomfortable, a little sad, and worst of all... bored.  It's just not good.

If I had to find a silver lining (that is, if a movie about a three way lips to ass, pass the poopie 'cause I'm hungry movie has a silver lining to it) it would have to be Dieter Laser's performance as the mad doctor who is, rather bluntly, named Doctor Heiter (because, you see, he's German and his name is only a couple of letters away from Hitler and we all know that Hitler was a very bad German guy, right?).  Laser brings some real deep down threat to the role of Heiter -- and it's a real and palpable threat.  The man looks unhinged even when he's just standing there doing nothing and that's something to laud about this movie.

As it turns out, sadly, it's the only thing to laud about this movie.

I hear that they're actually making a sequel to this movie (unsurprising, I guess since The Human Centipede is referred to as "The First Sequence").  I'm not sure exactly what about The Human Centipede warrants a continuation of the ass to mouth saga, but I'm willing to bet that given the general nonsensical bad taste of this movie, it will involve people stitched to the rectum of a horse.

I hate to use this pun, especially with this movie, but I left The Human Centipede with a bad taste in my mouth.  I'm just wondering who had the worst taste in their mouth, me or person number two?