Snippitts of Illusions

The Human Centipede: First Sequence.

There's a certain edge to a lot of horror movies that come out these days. I'm not sure exactly when this trend started, but I'm likely to point to foreign cinema, either Japanese horror like Audition, or French Extreme like High Tension or  Irreversible. American horror cinema caught on, or at least caught on again with films like Hostel, Saw and a handful of remakes like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. There seems to be an attitude among filmmakers of the extreme gore, and body horror genre's to out do one another. This has always been the case it seems: Cannibal Holocaust was so incendiary that the film makers had to produce all the actors of the movie to a court to prove they hadn't made a snuff film. I Spit On Your Grave was banned in several countries. Both of those movies were made in the 70's, and both are still pretty shocking (though not as shocking as a lot of films that come out now). Horror movie fans have become desensitized to the violence and gore. Japanese gorefests revel in it. While American torture porn rapes your mind and French extreme rapes your soul. So in order to get underneath the skin of the horror audience a film has to be pretty shocking or out there.

The Human Centipede does it. Sort of. It's a very different idea to the body horror, but not so different that it's unrecognizable as part of that genre of horror.

The movie opens with Dr. Heiter (Dieter Lasser) sitting in his car waiting for something. He cries quietly over a few photographs of what looks like three dogs sniffing each others asses. Soon a truck driver pulls over and walks out into the bushes to do his business  Dr. Heiter follows the trucker with a tranquilizer gun.

Now we cut to Lindsey (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) as they discuss their plans to hook up with a cute waiter that night at a club. The duo set off and are soon lost on a remote road and get a flat tire. With out cell phone reception and apparently not even the rudimentary mechanical skills to change a tire they set off into the woods to find help. They soon find a house out in the woods belonging to non-other than Dr. Heiter. He invites them in begrudgingly and bids them to sit. He pretends to call help for them while  he administers roofies via two glasses of water. Lindsey spills hers, this pisses the good Doctor off and he goes downstairs to get a towel. And a syringe full of drugs.

When the girls wake up they find themselves strapped to hospital beds. The trucker it turns out is the wrong blood type and is quickly put out of his misery by the good Doc and replaced by an angry Japanese man named Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), it's at this point that the Doc explains that he's going to severe all the tendons in their knees, pull the teeth and gums out of two of them, and sew them all together ass to mouth using flaps of muscle from one persons ass as a graft to the face of the person behind them. Not surprisingly this doesn't sit well with the group.

When the good Doc goes to give each anesthesia so he can start the surgery Lindsay escapes. She finds herself locked in the house and after some struggling finally manages to lock herself in the Doctor's bedroom. He goes around to an outside window and breaks it, causing her to flee to his indoor swimming pool. They seem at an impasse despite him carrying a tranquilizer gun. He closes the pool on her, but just before it seals shut the breaker kicks off and he leaves to deal with that. Lindsay takes this opportunity to go and rescue Jenny, dragging her through the basement, up the stairs and out the broken window before Heiter reappears and shoots her with a tranquilizer dart.

Now we have a short montage of the surgery. While there's certainly some gore in this film, it manages to not be extremely gory. There is blood here and there, and this montage is no exception, but the film doesn't really revel in the gore, and you'd almost expect it to. After the surgery and an indeterminate amount of recovery time, Dr. Heiter revives his new pet: The Human Centipede. The girls weep inconsolably while Katsuro swears vengeance on the good Doc. Heiter takes his time teaching the trio to walk, trying to convince them to fetch his paper and promising them that he's going to another surgery to remove their vocal chords as their constant weeping and yelling is keeping him from sleeping.

While examining the trio in his lab/operating room two detectives arrive to ask the Doc about missing people in the area. Seems there's been a lot lately and the Doc, being a creepy-ass retired surgeon, is on the list of people to talk to. Especially after a neighbor heard screaming in English coming from his property in the not too distance past. The Doc tries drug the cops. He only succeeds in drugging the first one and goes to the basement for a syringe as he did earlier in the film. While down in his lab to prepare the syringe he tells the trio that there will soon be four of them he's going to use the detectives to replace Jenny, she has an infection and is dying. His syringe is discovered and he tries to cover it up by claiming that it's penicillin. The detectives, skeptical,  would like to explore the house a little more. Dr. Heiter refuses and they leave (the drugs haven't kicked in yet) to go get a warrant to search the premise.

Meanwhile the trio gets a scalpel, manages to get of the table (not shown) and hide around a corner for the Doc to reappear. When he finally does Katsuro stabs him in the foot and the knee then bites a large chunk of flesh out of his neck. This renders the Doc unconscious for a few moments and semi-immobile. The trio escapes painfully and slowly up the stairs to the bedroom, where Lindsay knows they can break out a large window. Katsuro uses a lamp to break out the window but the Doc arrives, crawling himself, about this time. Grabbing a piece of glass for what looks like it will be the final showdown Katsuro precedes to tell the Doc (in Japanese) that he'd been a horrible person and that this is his punishment then cuts his own throat. It's at this point the detectives arrive. While the two detectives explore the house Heiter hides in his pool room, the drugged detective is dispatched by him there (unseen) and the other detective goes to investigate, discovers the trio on the way to the pool but is shot by the Doc when he arrives. Getting a single shot of his own which is clean through the Doc's head. We cut back to the two remaining in time to see Jenny die while holding Lindsay's hand and the camera pans out and up above the house. Credits roll.

Now I can't rant or rave about this film. Not like I can some others. I don't really like this movie though, and it has less to do with any of the my typical focuses for movies and more to do with some pretty perplexing things that are specific to this film.

The acting is pretty shoddy at times, but Lasser's Doctor Heiter, while ridiculous makes for a pretty good villain. Or protagonist? Here's the thing; I don't know that Dr. Heiter is the antagonist of the picture, and that Lindsay and the rest of the trio are the protagonists, and I'm not sure if director Tom Six knows that either. It's one of the most perplexing things about the film: I don't honestly know who the film makers want me to root for. That fact alone bothers me. I'm not against rooting for the obvious bad guy, but in order to do that the bad guy has to have some redeeming qualities other than the fact he's being played by a competent actor. Dr. Heiter has none. He's selfish, and uncaring, and is really just completely unlikable.

The camera work is beautiful at times and the movie strikes a mood of unease right from the first shot. It's definitely horror. But when I watch a horror movie I want to be engaged  either by entertainment value or by the underlying themes. I wasn't with this film. It's not entertaining to see people sewn ass to mouth and miserable for 45 minutes. For the record it's not terribly entertaining to watch people tortured for no real reason either, which is why I don't like the Hostel series. But on the other side of the coin there's nothing here to engage me. I'm not sure what the movies underlying message is. No, horror movies don't have to have one, though most do at least in subtext. This one really doesn't. Maybe it's "Narcissism doesn't pay."? Perhaps it's "Modern medical doctors can be nutty."? I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, and I get the sense that it doesn't have one. With those two things against it I can't say much about it. It has no real merit other than to become a pop-cultural reference, and I think it's even played that card out.

So while the film is beautiful at times visually, and it is very original in it's take of the body horror genre (at least for a western film) it's also very... dare I say MEH? While it's shocking to watch in one sense, reflecting on it after the fact is a bit of a let down. Not like a couple of films that are coming up.

1 1/2 out of 5 Beards.

Labels: Movie Reviews

posted by F.G. Shaw @ 11:02 PM