Body horror of a most repulsive kind, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) pushes at, and finally barrels
straight through, the boundaries of modern cinematic shock-imagery. Tom Six’s exploitation
film is designed to elicit not simply revulsion but urgent questions of “why?”,
as his story – about two American tourists who fall victim to a German doctor’s
lunatic experiment – delivers on its insane premise without ever quite
intimating an underlying reason for staging such madness in the first place.
Six’s set-up is thin gruel: heading out to a club, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams)
and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) wind up stranded on a forest road when their car
breaks down, compelling them (after a passerby sexually menaces them) to
randomly walk through the woods until they stumble upon the home of a big bad
wolf, Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser). Some doped glasses of water later, the girls
awaken to find themselves strapped to hospital beds, listening to Dr. Heiter
explain his plan to use them – as well as a newly captured Japanese man named
Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura) – in a procedure to form the titular insectoid
“structure.” It turns out Heiter’s career was as a surgeon who separated
Siamese twins, making his latest endeavor the unification flip-side to his
former work. Otherwise, though, Six provides scant subtextual currents to the mad
doctor’s plot, save for the fact that his first name is Joseph and Katsuro
slanders him as a “Nazi,” suggesting that perhaps Heiter is a symbolic Return
of the Reich determined to punish, by proxy, both his American foes and disappointing
Japanese comrades. The director’s dreamily gliding camerawork and canny framing
generate a mood of inevitable doom, and the square-jawed, psychotic-looking
Laser seems to have been born to play Heiter, a maniac so frightening he’s
occasionally amusing. Most important to the proceedings, however, is that Six’s
narrative doesn’t back off from its prime threat – by midway point, Heiter has
not only created his ass-to-mouth human centipede (with Lindsay, punished for
trying to escape, as the dual-connected middle segment), but he’s set about
trying to train it like a dog. It’s mind-boggling monstrousness, and if the
demented film proves disappointingly devoid of any serious thematic meat, it
nonetheless proves a haunting one-track exercise in body-invasion terror, ably achieving
its goal of providing original, eye-scrub-required horror imagery.
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