The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2010) */*****

Doing a quick search around the web for definitions of the word “porn” led me to the general consensus that porn seems to be explicit depictions of sexual behavior meant to arouse sexual excitement in the viewer.  The term “torture porn” has been thrown around the film world a lot lately to describe works like Hostel and the Saw series.  I guess what people are getting at is that these films are explicit depictions of torture meant to arouse some sort of sadistic pleasure in its viewers.  By all accounts writer/director Tom Six’s new film The Human Centipede should fit right into the genre.  The question I must raise is, what do you call a film that contains little more than explicit scenes of torture and somehow manages to bore?  With the first installment in his Human Centipede series Tom Six may have created the first torture lullaby.

The story of the film centers on a couple of young American tourists lost in the German wilderness named Lindsay (Ashley C Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie).  You’ll know that their names are Lindsay and Jenny because they end every one of their sentences with the other’s name. 

“I told you that, Linsaaay-a”. 

“Well excuse me, Jennaaay-a”.

Of course I paraphrase, but not by much.  It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds listening to these two vapid twits exchange dialogue before I was more than ready to start watching them get cut up.  That wish gets fulfilled at the hands of a sadistic and completely bat-shit surgeon named Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser).  The premise of the film has been covered ad nauseam around the Internet for the last couple of weeks, but for the benefit of those who may be uninitiated I’ll reveal a bit of the girls’ fate regardless.  You see, Dr. Heiter made a living as the world’s foremost expert in separating conjoined twins, but now in retirement, he’s decided that he would like to spend his twilight years grafting people together rather than pulling them apart.  Aww, he’s bringing people together!  That could be heartwarming, right?  Not in this film.  Not when he’s grafting them mouth to anus.  Once Lindsay and Jenny happen upon Dieter’s homestead they are promptly drugged, chained to hospital beds, and informed they are about to be turned into an uninterrupted digestive chain along with a Japanese man named Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura).  If you’ve lost count, that’s three people, two girls, one boy, joined from mouth to anus: a human centipede.  If you’ve seen this concept play out in the film’s trailer, read about the premise on a blog, or just caught wind of the project by general word of mouth, then you’re probably wondering where on Earth such a mad, deranged film is going to go from there.  Unfortunately, the answer is nowhere.  I hope you like to listen to people whimpering like puppies for an hour straight!  I was on board at first.  Every time the two American girls opened their mouths I was ready to listen to them scream their soulless hearts out.  I was prepared to eat popcorn as unspeakable horrors were committed to them.  Instead I got an hour of them bandaged up and whimpering.  Somehow, they still managed to be annoying!  Good lord movie, you’re missing the point!

Okay, to be fair, there is a little bit more that goes on.  One of the girls gets free early on and manages to make a run for it.  The problem with that is, the centipede hadn’t been made yet so any chance of her escaping harm was out of the picture, and I couldn’t consequently manage to muster up any excitement for the sequence.  Later on, a couple of policemen show up at the front door looking for the missing girls.  This would have been all well and good, a chance for some action or suspense, but the film had already bored me for over an hour at that point and I was completely tuned out.  In between these two glimmers of plot hope, you get Dr. Heiter prancing around the gauze wrapped daisy chain, babbling crazy rants, and listening to his subjects cry.  Laser is actually pretty fun in the role.  He’s manic, completely unhinged, and authentically evil.  I couldn’t imagine anybody else being a more believable recreation of a sort of Mengele-esque medical monster, and if he had just been cast in a film where he had more to do I could have seen this character being really effective.  Here his efforts were futile. 

This is a film that’s hard to review based on how little there is to it.  It’s a feature length film, a planned trilogy, based on a premise rich enough to support little more than a short film.  A crazy doctor is going to sew people together in a chain so they have to poop into each other’s mouths; and then that’s it.  How can I recommend what it could have done to improve short of writing another movie for them?  It needed something else going on.  Anything.  Maybe a subplot with a friend of the two girls trying to find them before they get sewed together, maybe an assistant of the doctor’s who slowly grows compassionate toward the victims and eventually turns on his master, maybe anything that could have given the film some sort of forward motion and reason to keep watching.  Halfway into this film, this disgusting piece of shock schlock, I was so not disgusted, so not affected, that I was having trouble keeping my eyes open.  I can’t think of a bigger failure for a film that was trying to achieve little more than to cheat a reaction out of it’s audience and get people talking. 

The Human Centipede 
The Human Centipede [Blu-ray]