In Which Nome Watches The Human Centipede

[naomi_jay]

You all knew it would happen. I am drawn to things like this like a moth to a baffling and repulsive flame. But first, some background.

Obviously when I first stumbled across this film, I was concerned. Not only by the content, which sounded wrong and bad, but by the percieved pointlessness and hopelessness of such a film. I decided I probably wouldn't watch it because it would probably be too gross and sick for my brain to handle, and I'd implode or the world would end, or something. I discussed my concerns on Twitter and was told I couldn't possibly have an opinion on the film NOT BECAUSE I HADN'T SEEN IT BUT BECAUSE IT WAS FICTIONAL. And guys, you can't have opinions on fiction. From that second on, my fate was sealed. I was destined to watch The Human Centipede. And last night, I did. So:

 

The Plot

The film opens with our hero Frankenstein-esque figure Promethean inventor a crazy German doctor crying in his car. He's crying over a picture of three Rottweilers sewn together mouth to anus, which is frankly worth crying over. Then a truck pulls up nearby and the driver gets out to answer the call of nature. Our opportunistic doctor sneaks out of the car and drugs the trucker. I've no idea if this is premeditated or random chance, or what. There's no way to tell because there is no context given for anything that happens in this film. Ever.

Anyway. Doctor Heiter (for that is his name) drugs and kidnaps the trucker. Cut to our fearless heroines sterotypical horror film cliche girls. They're getting ready for a crazy night out and one of them is asking directions to a night club on the phone. For what it's worth, they're American tourists called Jenny and Lindsay, but since they display no discernable personalities or character traits whatsoever except utter stupidity, they may as well just be called Girl A and Girl B. So, they drive off into the rainy night looking for their night club, and of course their car breaks down on a deserted stretch of road near a dark and creepy forest. Since, as we know, Germany is a poorly developed and industrially backwards country, the girls can't get any reception on their mobile phones to call for help. And since, as we know, following the road in the hope of finding a petrol station, cafe, or town would be the sensible thing to do in this scenario, Jenny and Lindsay decide to head into the dark and creepy forest in search of help instead. From who? The woodland folk? The Seven Dwarves? Also, it's pissing it down and the girls are wearing flimsy dresses and high heels, the ideal ensemble for traipsing through a stormy night in a foreign country.

Naturally they find Dr Heiter's house, which (and please remember this bit because it's important) is extremely isolated. Like, there's nothing but dark and creepy woods for miles around. Anyway, the knock on the door, of course, and Heiter answers and there's some back and forth along the lines of "we're lost and need help" (which is their own fault for leaving the car, really) and "come in, are you related? Are you tourists?" (which is just plain suspicious, frankly). The girls sit meekly in Heiter's living room staring at weird pictures of conjoined twins, and Heiter gives them drugged water and pretends to call a tow truck for them.

Awkward silence ensues, so one of the girls asks Heiter if he lives here with his wife. He replies "no, I hate human beings." OH GOOD. Maybe now is the time the alarm bells start ringing, no? But of course, it's too late because one of them? Jenny? has already drunk her drugged water and passed out, and before we know it, we're all strapped to hospital gurneys in the basement screaming and crying for our mothers.

Now, our hapless trucker is down here too, but sadly he is not long for this world. Turns out he's not compatible with the girls, so Heiter injects him with ... something, and he dies, and Heiter buries the body and magically produced a Japanese guy to replace him. Where did this Japanese guy come from? Who knows! It's safe to assume he's also a tourist, but he doesn't speak either English or German, so God knows what he's doing in Europe. Of course, as Kyle pointed out, not knowing the language doesn't necessarily preclude him being in the country, but it's never addressed. Japanese Guy is essentially a plot device, and like so many other things in this film, has no context outside it. You know, most horror films at least attempt to construct a solid world around their credibility-stretching plots. Say what you like about Hostel, but at least the characters can be seen to exist outside of their immediate situation. The Human Centipede employs no such skill. Everyone within the film exists solely to suit Heiter's ambition of creating a human centipede for reasons that are never explored.

Anyway. Heiter employs some crudely drawn diagrams to explain to his victims what's going to happen next. Basically he's going to remove their kneecaps and some teeth, and stitch them together to make, of course, a centipede. Why, you ask? No reason. Just because that's the premise of the film, and this film is nothing but it's premise. I have to say, the diagrams cracked me up. They looked like something out of a kid's primary school science text book. I chose to believe this was a deliberate choice to insert some kind of sinister subtext to the film, because otherwise Heiter is just a crappy artist on top of everything else, but I doubt it. So everyone screams and cries and Heiter goes to drug one of the girls (I think that's what he was doing anyway; for all it matters he might have been copping a feel), at which point the other girl (Lindsay? We'll say it's Lindsay) realises she can undo her restraints with her teeth and makes a daring escape. Huzzahs! Know what I would have done? Freaking well bashed Heiter's head in. But I've seen lots of horror films; Lindsay has obviously seen none.

So she runs off into the house, finds everything locked and ends up in Heiter's swimming pool (he has a swimming pool?). Heiter comes after her with a dart gun and she begs him to just kill her instead. In all fairness to Heiter, he does suggest she let herself drown, but apparently Lindsay doesn't want to commit suicide, and so she ends up back in the basement/surgery room, destined to be the middle segment of the centipede as punishment for her rebellion. I know this failed escape scene was supposed to create tension, and kudos to Tom Six for trying, bless him, but at this point I was really annoyed with Lindsay for being TSTL from the start of the film, let along wandering off into the woods in a storm in the middle of the night, and frankly felt she deserved whatever fate befell her.

So! The Operation! I knew from reading around that there's not much explicit horror in this film, and so the operation is pretty bloodless and the scene is relatively short. It's also intercut with a few shots of Heiter sitting around looking exhausted. I don't know what that's supposed to prove. it's not like I'm going to admire his stamina or skill or anything; he is after all a raging sociopath who's stitching human beings to each other's anuses for no apparent reason. I don't care if he's tired.

Some Time Later, we see Heiter standing over his centipede as it (they? I don't know. As soon as the operation was complete, it felt wrong to refer to the people as individuals anymore, but since the 'pede is composed of a man and two women, I wasn't sure what gender appellation to give it, so it became it. I know that probably means Six succeeded in dehumanising the victims and making me complicit in their suffering, but I don't care) come around and discover their... unfortunate predicament. Cue lots of muffled screaming and crying, and Heiter standing over the centipede cackling manically in the best mad scientist tradition. I'm pretty sure he even said "I've done it!" which totally took away any sinister tone the scene might have had for me.

Now. At this point, Kyle and I were devoting some serious energy to wondering exactly what Heiter would do with his centipede now he had it. We considered what we would do with such a creature, should we ever create one, and decided that short of sending it to join a circus (and what self-respecting circus would take it?) there probably wasn't much that could be done with it. Apparently both Heiter and Tim Six reached the same conclusion, because this is what Heiter does with his centipede:

He tries to train it to fetch his newspaper.

Yeah. I guess dogs aren't novel enough. It was at this stage I realised exactly how poorly conceived The Human Centipede is. Heiter has presumably spent quite a lot of time planning this. I mean, he came up with the idea in the first place, then he had to get all the surgerical equipment and medical bits and pieces in place, and then he had to find three compatible people to sew together. He has clearly put considerable time and resources into achieving his ambition, and now he has achieved it he's... making it fetch newspapers. Lack of imagination? I think so. If that's all he wanted, he should have stuck with the Rottweillers, possibly without sewing them together, and they could have brought him many newspapers, along with sticks and bones and other assorted presents. Dogs like doing that kind of thing.

And this just confirms my initial suspicion that all Tom Six has is an idea without substance. The idea, obviously, is the human centipede and how gross and shocking it would be if someone created one. But that's all he's got. There's no depth, no exploration of the human condition, and no reason to care about what's happening. The characters are paper tigers at best, existing only to serve the idea. Know what this film should have been? A six minute Rammstein video. As an entire film, it pretty much shoots its load half-way through, and the load is unimpressive.

Anyway. For some reason, the Japanese Guy (who is the head of the 'pede) objects to having to fetch the paper, so we cut to a scene of him eating from a dog food bowl. He also objects to this and bites Heiter on the leg. Heiter objects to that and kicks Japanese Guy in the ribs and they yell at each other in languages the other person doesn't understand. Then it's night time, and the 'pede is in a cage, crying some more, which is fair enough. Then it's the next day and we're in the garden and Heiter is again trying the newspaper trick, because he's nothing if not single-minded. Newspaper Fail continues.Then the Japanese Guy very apologetically and traumatically takes a dump into the middle girl's mouth, which delights Heiter. Yes! His 'pede is working as predicted! The fact that we, you know, expel this waste from our bodies because it's, you know, waste and therefore not suitable nourishment is a minor flaw, and the least of my problems with this film, so we'll gloss over that.

Cut back to night time in the cage, and the 'pede is still crying, and Heiter isn't getting any sleep, you guys, because the damn thing won't shut up, so he goes and yells at it, which does nothing to alleviate the situation. Next morning he examines each person in the 'pede and decides that the end girl is getting sick and dying. OH REALLY? BUT WHY? Surely her diet of twice-digested human faeces can't be anything to do with it?

Enter the police.

Yeah, so remember how Heiter's house is really isolated and far away from everywhere? Well, forget that, because a witness heard an American girl screaming the other night and called the police. I didn't know you could work out people's nationalities from their screams. Nor do I have any idea what this witness is all about, because I can't imagine why anyone would be anywhere near Heiter's isolated and remote house (Wait! Was it a paper boy? He obviously gets papers delivered), so I decided to chalk this one up to Serving the Idea too. And maybe also Six realised he'd shot his load and decided to pad out the rest of the film with serious police action. I don't know.

Anyway. The police are there because of the witness, and they question Heiter who gets all uppity and offers them drugged water too, and because the police officers are slightly more astute than the American girls, they suspect All Is Not Well and start talking about warrants. Chaos ensues! I admit my memories of this part of the film are slightly fuzzy because Ket was slithering down my top and I had to haul him out, so I missed some of the dialogue. But I can surmise thusly:

Heiter wants to use the officers to add to the 'pede. A fight breaks out. One officer is injured. Heiter runs down to the basement to yell at the 'pede. Japanese Guy  does "something" and by "something" I mean "Ket, please don't go into my bra, you're distracting me," and then Heiter is unconscious and the 'pede is struggling to get up the basement stairs. And I do mean struggling. Like, stitches are pulling apart and stuff. This irritated me beyond belief, because it's very apparent from earlier scenes that the 'pede has been getting around fine prior to this. It's been upstairs, out in the garden, wandered round the pool, and done it all with no signs of strain. But suddenly it's all unco-ordinated and it can't manage the stairs without a lot of pain and muffled screaming and yelling FOR NO REASON. I mean, it's not injured. Obviously the back girl is dying, so she's kind of holding the procedure up, but that doesn't account for the sudden monumental effort it takes for the 'pede to do something it clearly has been doing just fine up until now.

Anyway. Heiter follows the 'pede upstairs and there's a tense confrontation in the living room where Six decided his film needed a moral. So Japanese Guy starts ranting about what a bad person he was, how he abandoned his parents and kid, and didn't respect his own body, so basically he deserves this. And I'm all "WTF? Don't shoehorn in some crappy moral about how if we are bad people we deserve to be sewn mouth-to-anus to another person, because that is stupid. It doesn't play on any inherent fears I have. I suspect this is a "look, losing control of your body is horrible!!!" type of thing, but I already know that because I've been paralytically drunk and all that taught me was to avoid tequila at all costs."

Anyway. Japanese Guy then kills himself by cutting his throat with a shard from a broken mirror. One of the cops returns and suddenly for some reason Heiter is dead by the swimming pool and so is the cop. We're left with Jenny and Lindsay, and Jenny (end girl) is dying and then she's dead, and Lindsay is left alone in the house, doomed to die also, and thus the film ends.

My Thoughts

I admit I may have over-prepared myself for this film. I'd heard so much about it, read so many interviews with Six, and seen so many accounts of how it's the grossest thing ever and people were vomiting in the cinema and walking out, and how casting it was near impossible because so many actresses refused to play the roles, etc etc... I was ready to be nauseated. Like, physically repulsed and messed up and having nightmares because it was just that bad-ass a film.

I wasn't and it isn't. As mentioned, the actual gore level is quite low. Once the surgery scene is done, the actors are made up with bandages to hide most of their faces and rears, so all the really stomach-churning stuff is implicit rather than explicit. I suppose there's an argument about what the mind conjures is far worse than anything the director can show, and sometimes that's true, but in this case it just feels like either Six didn't have enough money to do the special effects, or he didn't have the guts to go through with the premise.

And, as mentioned, the premise is all we have. Characterisation is shallow enough to be non-existant and internal logic is sorely lacking, so the entire film rests on it's central conceit. And when you break that down, all you have is people shitting on each other, which is just stupid. I'll give credit to the actor playing Heiter: he really committed to the role. He chewed all the scenary. But despite his enthusiasm, Heiter remained a cypher, a method of getting Six's idea on the screen, just like the other characters. At the end of the film, I still had no idea why Heiter wanted to make a human centipede, or why he couldn't fetch his damn paper himself. There's some dialogue between him and the cops that reveals he's a well-respected surgeon, and the cojoined twin pictures and dog thing lead one to assume an underlying obsession with taking apart and putting together human beings, but that still doesn't give me any insight into his psyche. He's a convenient sociopath, acting the way he does because the plot requires it. You know, I can imagine what Jigsaw would be doing outside of a Saw film: he'd be designing the games on the Crystal Maze, or making educational toys or maybe just chilling with a good sudoko book. I've no idea what Heiter would do outside of The Human Centipede, except sit around being sinister. He's not a real person.

Neither are the other characters. Jenny and Lindsay are also there solely because the plot requires them; there's nothing organic about their situation. The Japanese Guy? I've no idea what he was doing there at all. So on a purely technical level, the film fails because it isn't believable. For me, that means it can't succeed as a horror film. Of course horror stretches the boundaries of credibility all the time, but I usually overlook that and just enjoy myself if the story is compelling or the characters are engaging, and I'll forgive a lot of a film if it delivers that. This film doesn't. The story is silly. So maybe it's a black comedy? I mean, Teeth was a black comedy, right? It's not impossible that Six thinks this is a totally hilarious romp and that shit jokes are the best thing ever.

It's not impossible, but I don't believe this is supposed to be a comedy simply because it isn't funny. It's not even one of those films where you can see where the jokes are supposed to be, but they don't work. I don't know what this film is, frankly. It's just stupid, which is perhaps the most offensive thing about it. I've heard people say it's disgusting - it is, but not disgusting enough to qualify as body horror, so fail. I've heard people say it's innovative - it's not; it's a primitive rehashing of Frankenstein without any of the depth, elegance or morality. I was left sort of nonplussed and annoyed at the end, rather than sickened or saddened, so for me at least, this mostly rates as "overhyped." I can't imagine how there's going to be a sequel (a twelve-person 'pede!), unless someone finds Heiter's crappy drawings and thinks, "good idea, but he didn't think big enough!" I'm not sorry I watched it, because at least now my curiosity is satisfied, but it's hardly a film I could recommend to anyone else on any level. It's not clever, it's not funny, it's not scary, and it's not shocking. It's just ... dumb.

 

Comments

[dwg.livejournal.com]

IIRC from the Wikipedia page, there was some kind of commentary on WWII or something like that and that's why there's two American girls and a Japanese guy getting stitched together by a crazy German.

I'm thinking that your observations is why Ebert refused to give it any rating. It's a movie. And...that's it, there's nothing else to it. It did what it set out to do, but there's nothing witty, creative, or even vaguely insightful to provide entertainment for the audience.

...what what. Why would he remove their kneecaps? This makes no sense. Kneecaps are important. Out of what box of cereal did he get his medical degree? Obviously he missed his rotation at the psych ward.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you wrote this. Now I know for sure that I really don't need to see this.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

So they can't stand up straight, forcing them to stay on their hands and knees. Because sewing their mouths to their anuses wouldn't prevent them standing up straight at all, obviously.

And yeah, I read the WWII theory too; Six has kind of confirmed he had that vaguely in mind, but I don't buy it because it implies more thought went into the film than just "ha ha, this would be way cool!"

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Nobody needs to see this. Ever. For any reason.

[nathreee.livejournal.com]

You made a great sacrifice to save us all.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Hey. It's what I do.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

And there are better movies out there that are based on a "ha ha, this would be way cool!" premise. Usually those movies have hot shirtless people blowing shit up.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

And are called The Expendables.

[spiderling.livejournal.com]

I wish someone had saved me from Reqium for a Dream this way! THANK YOU!

And the review made me laugh so hard! 'Newspaper fail contiues.' :D Ha!

[blythe025.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have no interest in seeing this movie. Now I know I won't have to waist my time.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

You're welcome :)

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Lol, glad I could help!

Познавательный блог

[toniaiso.livejournal.com]

Классный блог (http://site-sex-znakomstva.ru/)