For all the notoriety garnered by its outlandish premise, Tom Six’s 2009 cult-horror sensation The Human Centipede was a relatively tame experience. The idea of a mad-scientist surgically stitching three humans front to end as a disgusting experiment (“100% Medically Accurate!” proclaimed the tagline) proved more gruesome in the imagination than anything that was actually portrayed in the film and the finished product displayed a somewhat admirable restraint in what it actually revealed to the audience. Soon after the film started to make waves, however, writer/director Six began making promises that the sequel would “make the first look like My Little Pony,” delivering on the disgusting potential of the premise to make the most revolting movie of all time.
Two years later, The Human Centipede II has arrived with no little fanfare; the British Board of Film Classifications refused to classify the film due to its extreme content, effectively banning it in the United Kingdom. That is objectionable to me for two reasons: One: because I am against censorship as a general rule and Two: because banning the film gives it more notoriety and the film, as disgustingly over the top as it is, doesn’t warrant the attention.
Martin is a hugely obese, anti-social loser who passes his days working in a parking garage in London and being emotionally abused by his unstable mother. Martin, who in his youth suffered sexual abuse at the hands of his father, is obsessed with the original Human Centipede, watching it over and over again and fantasizing about recreating the titular experiment for himself. In between being screamed at by his abusive downstairs neighbor, enduring death threats from his mother and pleasuring himself to a DVD of the original film, Martin begins to put into motion a plan to further the Human Centipede legacy, abducting people who pass through his parking garage and storing them in an abandoned warehouse, where he begins his deranged continuation of the work begun in the original film,
The first thing that should be evident from that plot synopsis of Human Centipede II is that it is not a direct sequel to the first film, but rather a film about the first one. Yes, much like Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, this is a meta-movie, one that purports to comment on the original film, its fans and the psychological toll that cinematic violence can take on fans of such fare. He even brings back one of the stars of the first film (Ashlynn Yennie) to play herself as an actress who becomes part of Martin’s twisted experiment. This is a risky proposition at best (see the aforementioned Blair Witch 2, or better yet, don’t), but at least it can be said that Six is not repeating himself here as might be the obvious route to take after having initial success. Unfortunately that’s pretty much all that can be said about this sequel, as any cleverness or ingenuity begins and ends with the premise. The film itself spends its first two-thirds mired in tedium, giving us endless scenes of Martin watching the first film, being berated by his mother and every so often bashing someone over the head and dragging them to his grimy lair. We witness this procession of scenes play out no less than four times, the film seemingly determined to bore its audience to death. This stretch of the film isn’t helped by its approach to its characters, who either embody shallow Psych 101 character types (Martin is a crazed maniac because he was abused as a child), or are one-note, nightmarish fiends (besides Martin’s crazed mother, even his psychologist is a predatory creep bent on molesting him). Only a few of Martin’s slowly accumulating pool of victims are given any distinguishing characteristics at all; One is pregnant, one is a jerk with lots of tattoos and the others are faceless stand-ins existing to be mutilated horribly. After all this tedium one begins to long for something, anything, else to happen to alleviate sense of boredom.
The final half-hour or so, however, will make you pine for the preceding segment of film, as monotony is replaced by excruciating violence. “Be careful what you wish for” seems to be the motto for this part of the movie, as Tom Six gives viewers all of the viscera that was only hinted at in the previous Centipede. Flesh is cut, tendons are sawed through, tongues are ripped out, teeth knocked out with a hammer and more. All the while the camera lingers on the horrifying aftermath, lovingly rendered in black and white photography (which does nothing to diminish the impact). The inevitable “feeding” scene goes so far over the top that it reaches South Park-level absurdity that would provoke laughs if it wasn’t so repulsive. The concluding half-hour seems designed to test the limits of what an audience will accept in a horror film, but it’s all just too much. By the time the most heinous incident occurs (which involves barbed wire) I didn’t feel much of anything, because Six had already bludgeoned me into submission. An incident involving a pregnant woman manages to shock only because it goes to such ludicrous lengths to provoke a reaction. After all of this the film wraps up with an ending that is the definition of a cop-out, rendering everything that the film has shown you utterly without consequence.
The ingredients were there to make Human Centipede II a unique entry into the horror canon. The story contained the possibility to examine how movie violence takes its toll on those who watch it as well as how movie fans can pervert and distort their objects of fandom by crossing into obsession. Unfortunately the film’s psychology is much too shallow to realize that potential, so what the viewer is left with is a parade of tedium punctuated by violence so extreme that it becomes numbing. It seems that Tom Six has thoroughly exhausted his concept within just two films, though he has plans for a third. Human Centipede II will make you long for the comparative restraint and refinement of the first installment and reveals Tom Six as a filmmaker of disgusting, resoundingly limited imagination.
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