Netherlands | 2009 | Directed by Tom Six
Logline: A deranged surgeon kidnaps and mutilates a trio of tourists in order to create a human centipede for his perverse pleasure.
Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are two 20-something American tourists looking for a good time in Germany. They’re not the brightest sparks, but they don’t deserve the hell they’re going to. En route to a out of town club they become lost, and then strike out with a flat tire. They wander aimlessly through the woods and stumble upon the isolated home of one Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), a retired surgeon who has recently laid his “3-dog” to rest at the edge of the manicured lawn.
The doctor’s expertise at conjoined twins detachment is now being used for reverse purposes. With consummate skill he incapacitates the two young women and they wake to find themselves strapped to hospital beds in the doctor’s underground surgery. An earlier abduction is done away with, as he is no longer suitable. In his place a young Japanese man, Katsuro (Akihiro Kutamura) is procured. Now the doctor can begin the operation, but not before briefing his “patients” on what exactly he has planned for them with white board diagrams and verbal explanation. It’s going to far from pretty.
This post-modern Prometheus is poised to configure the ultimate pet: a conjoined three-person creature with one mouth and one elongated digestive tract, by cutting, peeling, grafting, stitching and sealing the second and third mouths to the first and second anuses. Where did writer/director Tom Six come up with such an atrocity?! Apparently inspiration rose from a joke he made to friends that a child molester should have their mouth sewn to the arsehole of a very fat truck driver. That and Pasolini’s Salo.
Ten years on and The Human Centipede is still a strong and repugnant delight, working as a creeping thriller, then sliding into visceral horror, yet somehow there’s a comedy black as midnight on a moonless night sniggering in the corner. It’s an expertly engineered nightmare that creates deep empathy for the poor hapless victims. As the situation begins to spiral out of control one wonders how on earth the movie can end, but Tom Six does the premise justice, in disturbingly nihilistic fashion.
The movie is well-paced, yet suitably gruelling in places. There’s an unusual elegance to the mise-en-scene, exuding a European sensibility, the creeping camerawork, a starkness and minimalism in the production design. The performances are excellent, with Dieter Laser’s rogue doctor a real piece of work; a truly sinister-looking man, tall and thin, with a face like a lizard, smelling oozing pus and licking blood off the stairs, armed with a hypodermic and a scalpel and a crazed glint in his oily eye (his full name Josef Heiter is a reference to Nazi surgeon Mengele).
Yes, The Human Centipede is sick and twisted and well-made. Imagine a Troma movie directed by Werner Herzog. If you can. Not for all tastes, but rewarding for those who can stomach its revolting centrepiece.