THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE)

This film starts off by paying its dues to a number of horror movie conventions. We are introduced to two dotty, sexed-up American ladies road-tripping through Germany. As is often the way when Americans venture into foreign climbs, their car receives a flat tyre and they find themselves hobbling on their high-heels through woodland in the dead-of-night. It’s when they make their way through the woods and find Dr. Heiter’s house of residence that things start to get a little strange. Not that director Tommy Six’s vision of Germany isn’t a little perplexing from the get go. When the two girls are left stranded by their flat tyre, another car pulls up next to them, rolls down its window and reveals a rotund, heavily-perspiring German looking to take advantage of the hapless duo. The only normal Germans we see during the course of the entire film are two policemen introduced towards the end of the film and even they are characterised by a kind of bumbling inadequacy. 

Not that our two American representatives fair much better – they are loud, screechy and generally annoying who inspire no sympathy whatsoever. They aren’t helped by some horrendously clunky dialogue (sample: “There’s no signal” – “What? There’s always a signal!”). It comes as something of a relief when at the films midpoint, the two girls find their mouths clamped to the back-end of another human being thus removing their ability to talk. This is all part of Dr Heiter’s (played by the sinister Dieter Laser) twisted design. He seeks to create a self-sustaining human Siamese-triplet – or as it comes to be known the Human Centipede. The mechanisms and the manner in which these humans connect to one another are almost too horrible to describe, but if you’ve seen the trailer or heard any rumblings about this film, you’ll likely already know about it. There are times during the course of this movie that you’ll need an iron stomach just to persist with this film’s brutal distastefulness. Cinema-goers have been subject to toilet humour for some time now (thanks Adam Sandler) but now it seems we have to be subject to toilet horror too?

The question of whether this is something that we as an audience want to see is somewhat null and void (although the film survived only on the basis of a strong word of mouth campaign – “did you hear about the film where a crazy doctor sews together three human beings by their...”). It’s void because The Human Caterpillar is a badly put together film. Tommy Six, whilst making a brave decision to persist in the creation of this film and not to water down the central plot-conceit delivers a rather conventional film. The camerawork is your typical made-for-TV kind of fare (Six has his roots in Dutch television). The characters are dull and are only there to serve the plot. There’s no real sense of location – the film is set in Germany only because it allows Six to draw from and make comparisons to the various atrocities the Nazis committed revolving around experimenting on humans.

 In some respects this film is critic-proof. There will always be an audience for this film, because it’s so damn niche. There’s just nothing out there that plays on such a uniquely, stomach-churning and plain revolting level. The trouble is that viewers may arrive at this film expecting it to be equally as provocative and as unique as its premise and it really isn’t. There will be very few repeat-viewings of this film. Maybe a more talented cast and crew could create something equally distasteful yet exponentially more watchable. I can say now that I don’t think this will be the case with The Human Centipede II (The Final Sequence).