The Human Centipede was a 30 minute premise stretched to feature length status. It had a great villainous turn by Dieter Laser and a genuinely gross concept. The film itself wasn’t all that graphic (or good) but it horrified housewives all over the country by getting a release on Redbox and being available on the shelves of places like Target. For a film billed as “out there”, it was pretty amazing to see it so easily available to the unaware masses. The film was much ado about nothing, but that didn’t stop director Tom Six for putting a sequel into production and guaranteeing that it would show what the first film didn’t show and be the most “disturbing” film ever made. It helped that the prudes in England decided the film was so extreme as to not give it a classification (Six has thus cut the movie by 3 minutes himself to get the release). Explodey Jo had mentioned that she heard that HC2 was cut here in America. I checked the wiki page and it says the international cut is 87 minutes (U.K. is 84) and my version was indeed 87 minutes, so I am assuming I saw the uncut version. So, did my head asplode?

No. Long story short, this movie sucks. It’s not even particularly disturbing or gory compared to other movies. Let me explain….

The story centers around a fat, mentally handicapped garage attendant named Martin who goes around and clubs people over the head with a crowbar who enters his parking garage. Martin never speaks the entire film but he’s obsessed with The Human Centipede film, watching it continuously, keeping a pet centipede, and having a big scrapbook of news articles and reviews. He has decided to create his own human centipede, this time with twelve people instead of three. And that’s what happens. This one Rob Zombie’s Martin’s backstory. We find out that his dad molested him and his mom is a crazy nutjob who can’t parent properly and blames him for sending the father to prison. His doctor also wants to molest him. So this is another “This guy had bad shit happen to him so now he’s crazy” movies. Eventually, Martin gets his victims, even going so far as to abduct actress Ashlynn Yennie (the middle of the centipede in the first movie) after making it look like she is showing up to be cast in a Quentin Tarantino movie. He gathers them all up, puts them together and then makes them walk around. SOUND FAMILIAR?

The main aesthetic difference between this and the first movie is that it’s in black and white. The cinematography is good and the footage is sharp and crisp. The only reason people would watch this movie is for the alleged “disturbing” gore. I suspect strongly that Tom Six realized quite early on in the editing process that he didn’t have a very good movie and thus, rightly from his perspective, had to play up the big finale in order to get eyeballs. Literally, the first 60+ minutes of this movie is nothing more than Martin hitting people on the head with crowbars, often off camera. For a movie that alleges to be the most disturbing thing ever, it’s pretty freakin’ tame. The gore only starts when Martin starts putting his centipede together. It’s exactly like the first movie. The victims are duct taped head to ass. You never actually see someone’s face being shoved into a butthole and stapled, or anything. The closest you get is some chicks face already being attached and Martin staples around it. If that’s what you were expecting to see (and if you were, what’s that say about you?), then you will be disappointed. There is one sequence where Martin hammers out a guys teeth, but it’s certainly no Corbin Bernson with a drill in The Dentist. There’s some close ups of Martin cutting the tendons in the knees. It’s only gory, though, in the same sense that cutting an achilles is “gory”. It’s more a visceral thing about tendon cutting than it is this movie being something “disturbing”. There’s also a scene where a woman gives birth in a car and then crushes its head when she pushes down on the gas pedal. The shot is so quick and not focused on that it doesn’t really have any impact.

The “money” sequence in this film is definitely the shit eating scene. Just like the first film, Martin wants to make everyone shit into each other’s mouths and to do that he injects them with laxatives. Part of the reason why the violence just doesn’t have any impact in this movie is precisely because of the black and white. When the guy is getting his teeth hammered out, it’s just black blood all over. It’s just  not as powerful as seeing actual, red blood spewing all over the place. It serves to mute the violence rather than amplify it. Same for the shit sequence. You just see some black “shit” coming out and then Six makes the incredibly stupid decision to make the shit the only thing in color and then do CG shit sprays onto the lens of the camera. That’s right. There is CG brown shit in this movie hitting the “lens” of the camera. I actually laughed out loud because it’s so ridiculous. It’s made worse by the fact that Martin is jumping around making farting noises while it happens. It’s not disturbing, it’s funny. In other instances, Six just doesn’t go very far. In one sequence, Martin comes up behind the last girl in the centipede. It kinda looks like he might be having sex with her, but it’s never actually shown in a definitive way. More like he’s just holding her from behind. There are many instances like this in the film, where Six never actually “goes there” when you’re expecting something disturbing. There is a scene where Martin masturbates with sand paper. It’s literally just a shot of Martin tearing sand paper in half, then a closeup of his face as he orgasms. Hardly the disturbing stuff of nightmares. More like the timidity of a hack director. This is a valid criticism because Six has actively promoted this by saying you’ll “see everything”. But you’ll get the strong sense that the guy pulled his punches.

I’m gonna go ahead and spoil that last moment of this film but it’s really not that big of a deal. So skip to the last paragraph if you really don’t want to know. The very end is a shot of Martin, back at his job, watching The Human Centipede as if nothing you just watched happened at all. It’s supposed to be left ambiguous but considering one of the victims got away and the fact that Martin murdered his doctor in the garage itself, it seems pretty improbable that he got out of the situation (Update: Feels pretty obvious that it’s all in his head). I imagine that Tom Six said this: “This movie actually means nothing at all. Since nothing really happens I’m gonna put this ending on and make it seem like a commentary on the fact that you just wasted your life watching something that wasn’t real to begin with.” It’s all really dull and stupid. It’s a last, desperate attempt to make this movie something more than it actually is, which is just a glorified wannabe extreme horror film.

The dude who plays Martin, Laurence Harvey, is compelling to watch not because he has any depth or acts particularly well, but because he’s just gross and weird looking. Because Six decides to explain that Martin was molested and comes from a broken home, it undercuts the entire notion that “horror movies create psychos” subtext that would have made the movie infinitely more interesting. I wonder how different this movie would have been if Six had decided to simply make Martin a “normal” kid from a happy home with no real problems rather than an overweight dude who looks like a child molester? Instead, it’s just a uninteresting crazy guy stapling people together and doing everything the first film did only not as graphic as Tom Six would have you believe.

The movie sucks. If you must watch it, wait until it shows up on Netflix and rent it there. It’s not worth spending money on.

Oh, and as for the BBFC: You guys must be on Tom Six’s payroll. I wonder what percentage of the gross those guys are getting? Banning all the way to the bank.

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