The Human Centipede 2

 

 

WARNING: DUE TO THE NATURE OF THE FILM I’M REVIEWING, READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.  THERE WILL BE SOME GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS THAT MAY NOT SIT WELL WITH SOME PEOPLE, OR ANY PEOPLE FOR THAT MATTER.  IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH, HIT THE BACK BUTTON ON YOUR BROWSER FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY.

Released: November 2011

Director: Tom Six

Run Time: 91 Minutes

Not Rated

Distributor: IFC Films

Cast:
Laurence R. Harvey: Martin Lomax
Ashlyn Yennie: Miss Yennie

Movies are generally made to entertain people.  It’s why people go to movies:  To be entertained.  Simple enough, right?  Not always.  Most movies are generally designed that way, sometimes with a message.  But there are a number of movies that were made to get a rise out of people.  I could go all the way back to The Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915, that is very provocative, even today.  But some of the most provocative and shocking movies dwell in the genre of horror.  In the 1970’s, there were a number of films that pissed a lot of people off.  Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, but it didn’t hold a candle to movies like I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust.  I don’t necessarily think that these films were made to specifically piss people off, it just happened that way.  The most famous of which was The Exorcist, which I consider to be one of the greatest horror films ever made.  While the films that I mentioned weren’t necessarily intended to anger people, they were made for a purpose: To expose the hypocrisy and contradictory nature of society.  Some of them went pretty overboard, to be sure.  Some of today’s horror films, while certainly graphic and shocking, are generally not made to do more than that.  The Human Centipede is one of those movies, but the sequel: The Human Centipede 2 really goes the distance.

To get into the story of The Human Centipede 2, I really need to talk about the events of the first movie.  The first movie involved a crazy surgeon, played by Dieter Laser, whose intention is to create the world’s first human centipede.  To do this he had drugged two girls who asked to stay the night, because their car had broken down.  When they woke up, the good doctor described what he had planned:  To create a human centipede with a single digestive system by surgically attaching their mouths to a person’s anus in front of them.  Now, the second film appears to pick up right where the first film left off.  As soon as the camera pulls back, we discover that The Human Centipede is nothing more than a movie.  When the camera rolls back we see a rotund, bald and mentally challenged man who is watching the film on a laptop.  The man, Martin, has been inspired by The Human Centipede to create a human centipede of his own, but with the twelve people instead of three.  I’m not going to go further into the story, because there really isn’t one.  The Human Centipede 2 was made for one purpose, and one purpose only:  To shock and disgust.  That’s not to say that the first film didn’t shock and disgust, but it took a “less is more” approach.  What I mean by that is that the gross stuff that was supposedly happening was left to the audiences imagination, where it was sure to be more horrific.  That’s actually a very artistic way of doing a movie like The Human Centipede.  The sequel, though?  Holy….shit.  Literally.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even call this movie an actual sequel, as it literally has somebody actually watching the first movie.  It’s a very interesting way of approaching a follow-up to a movie like Centipede.  Tom Six makes some pretty interesting stylistic choices while making the movie.  The most obvious one is that the film is in black and white.  It was filmed in color, but was later converted.  I think that was a brilliant idea.  For some strange reason, it makes the film a hell of a lot more effective.  Considering how gruesome the film is, I think having it in color would have made it come across as overly cartoony.  The black and white aesthetic actually makes the gore that much worse to stomach.  The effects in the film are all practical, no CGI to be found, and that’s always a welcome thing in a horror movie.  Nothing takes you out of a gut-wrenching horror movie than blatantly fake CGI blood.  The Human Centipede takes the whole restrained aspect of the first movie, and throws it out the window.  This is a very gory film.  In the first film, you had a character, that while insane, knew what he was doing medically.  Here, the main character of Martin is not right in the head, and his approach to surgery is….extremely primitive to say the least, and it shows.  It’s pretty gross, the way he knocks people’s teeth out with a hammer and then stitches their faces to other peoples’ asses with a staple gun.  The acting in the film is actually really good, particularly Laurence Harvey.  He’s a relatively new film actor, so it was very interesting to see him in a movie like this.  He’s fantastic.  The character is clearly not a fully-functioning individual that doesn’t speak and makes odd noises.  But his eyes really convey a particularly nasty brand of evil.  He does a fantastic job.  Ashlyn Yennie basically plays a caricature of herself, that for some reason gets fooled into thinking that Martin is some kind of film agent.

That right there, is one of the film’s biggest failings: Logic.  It is completely inconceivable that somebody like Martin, with his limited mental capacity, could even remotely get away with the shit that he does.  There is no way in hell that Martin couldn’t have been arrested or even killed by the people that he managed to abduct.  With his asthma, he’s clearly not physically capable of doing the things that he does.  I guess when you’re watching a movie like The Human Centipede, logic doesn’t really enter into the whole thing.  The other thing I noticed is that the film was made in response to critics of the first film.  People had complained about the lack of the nasty stuff.  Tom Six went full throttle here, and delivered all the shit and gore, and then some.  While I certainly appreciate the lack of punches pulled, I feel that the whole “less is more” approach of the first movie was far more effective in getting ideas across.  That’s just me though.  There’s also a very unnecessary sequence of a pregnant woman who was abducted but managed to get away.  The problem is that she ends up giving birth in the car and while she’s trying to escape, she ends up crushing the infant with her foot.  I really don’t think that was necessary at all.  That was clearly in there just for shock value.

The Human Centipede 2 got banned in several countries due to its graphic content.  Have you noticed a pattern when it comes to movies like this?  It seems like whenever a film like this gets released, people get into a pissing match over it.  I think Tom Six had that in mind when he made these movies.  While I think Tom Six is a talented director, I don’t think he’s really going to get anywhere if he keeps doing movies like this.  Right now, he strikes me as a one-trick pony.  He’s only making movies to shock audiences and piss off the censors.  That doesn’t always translate to a good movie.  The Human Centipede 2 isn’t a particularly bad movie.  It really isn’t.  It’s got some pretty fantastic performances, particularly from Mr. Harvey, but it’s not a movie that’s going to be remembered for that.  At the end of the day, the film gets an 8.5/10.

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