Woogmoog

Review: The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

The Human Centipede is a great movie.

It is a fucking great movie.

It is precisely what a horror movie should be, and that is horrifying. Lately, way too many horror movies have been taking the easy Saw/Hostel route, or have simply been cash grabs via endless 80s franchise remakes.

At least two people vomited at my showing at E Street Cinema in DC. That alone should make you want to buy a ticket. This isn’t like motion sickness from Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project. The concept of the movie made these people lose their lunch. That is awesome.

Despite being about three people being sown together ass to mouth by a deranged surgeon, The Human Centipede isn’t a hideously graphic movie. What the movie does do extremely well is having much of the disgusting stuff either handled off screen, or accompanied by horrific sound effects.

Sure, one of the Hostel movies has a scene where a man’s penis is torn off, but it’s done without any cinematic verve. A camera is pointing at the dude’s crotch, and suddenly we’re in Karo syrup city. It’s gross, but it’s not horrifying.

Meanwhile, everything in The Human Centipede is implied by sound effects or happens off-screen. Yet director Tom Six is able to tickle your brain’s disgust centers subtly and all the more horrifically. This is what good movies do.

The movie opens with two tourist girls lost in a rainstorm in some creepy woods in Germany. In short, they are terrible. Just about every line of dialogue is awfully written and awfully acted. You might be forgiven for not wanting to see the movie based on this, as the two girls form the brunt of the film trailers out there. Luckily, the two girls are silenced and sown up before the halfway point of the movie, and they’re shuttered to the background. The movie instead interestingly becomes a conflict between two characters – mad German surgeon Dr. Heiter and victim Katsuro.

Dieter Laser, who plays the demented Dr. Heiter is the star of the film (and not the titular Centipede). His deranged performance is frightening, disgusting and disturbing all at once. The film crystallized for me when he finally took off the bandages to see his creation “completed,” as it were. There is no maniacal mad scientist laughter accompanied by thunderclaps and booming trumpets; instead, he cries. He cries and writhes on the floor along with his creation, and this is possibly more sickening than anything that comes afterward. It’s almost as if he wishes he could become part of the sequence himself, but that would require another surgeon as crazy as he. He pulls a mirror to his face in orgasmic success and kisses it, mimicking the contorted, sown-together mass at his feet.

Besides Dr. Heiter, who speaks in stilted Indiana-Jones-Nazi-Villain-accented English, the only other speaking character is the unfortunate Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura) who forms the head of the creature, and who is only able to communicate in subtitled Japanese. One could even extrapolate that the film is saying something about communication, as neither Katsuro nor Heiter speak the others’ language, and with our lost tourist girls sown up in the background (literally), the conflict that arises between the two of them is fun to watch.

I don’t think I’m reaching too far to say there’s some sort of commentary of World War II happening somewhere in this movie (I am only sort of kidding.)

The cinematography and pacing in this movie is surprising and refreshing. There’s honestly never a dull or flat moment. The final chase through the antiseptic, hospital-esque house is exciting stuff, as are the earlier chases throughout the house. Besides disgust, there’s suspense and fun to be had here.

While it’s available to watch on-demand, this is a movie that needs to be seen in a huge crowd.

This is not, by any stretch, a bad film. Some critics have immediately dismissed this film as exploitative or gimmicky, and refuse to rate it or review it. This is nowhere near the incomprehensible mess of Transformers 2 (which has become my new benchmark in bad movies). This is also not anything like the horrendous, gut-wrenching inanity of something like The Room. The Human Centipede is a very real and very horrifying film, and needs to be experienced.

BOTTOM LINE: deranged, disgusting and frightening, but not in the exploitative, simplistic way you might have heard it is. An excellent horror film.

9.0/10