How to approach The Human Centipede? A film based on a disgusting, transgressive idea that in all other respects is almost completely conventional. You probably know the central premise–a mad doctor stitches three people together, butt to mouth, to form a creature with a continuous digestive system–but the big disappointment is that there is little else to the film.
The mad doctor is like an uglier, more depressing version of Udo Kier. The plot involves two American women lost in Germany on their way to a night club, who get a flat tire in the wrong place and fall into the doctor’s web. They get captured, they plead for mercy and don’t get it, they try to escape and fail, etc. It’s all like a dull, pretentious, disgusting twin to Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, a poetic classic of ‘medical horror’, a genre which itself owed a significant debt to Terence Fisher’s Curse of Frankenstein (1957).
That film had the great Peter Cushing playing Dr. Frankenstein as a driven, obsessed scientist striving to push the boundaries of knowledge into the very secrets of life itself. Human Centipede has Dieter Laser (nice handle) being angry and insane. It’s not progress, and especially a letdown in the faithful reproduction of dusty horror film cliches and its mechanical trudging through an uninspired plot.
Want to see a film that’s transgressive, shocking, and rather brilliant? Watch Tod Browning’s Freaks, a movie that’s almost 80 years old and still retains its power to disturb. Of course, Browning engages you in the characters and expertly manipulates your sympathy. Human Centipede director Tom Six doesn’t seem to give a shit beyond his one, sick joke that he built an entire film around.
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