MY TWO CENT(IPEDE)S

Moviemakers who deal in extreme or sadistic violence have been known to defensively pooh-pooh the notion that their work might inspire real-life imitators. But Tom Six, Dutch writer-director of last year’s disgusting-but-compelling The Human Centipede (First Sequence), is afflicted with no such modesty. The main character of his “meta” follow-up, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), is an obsessed fan of the original who seeks not only to reproduce the atrocity depicted therein, but to expand upon it.

For the (perhaps fortunate) unitiated: The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was about a German surgeon (the unforgettable Dieter Laser) who for no particular reason other than to see if it could be accomplished, created a human “Siamese triplet,” with a gastric tract running mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus-to-mouth-to-anus, out of two young American women & a Japanese man he'd taken captive. The Doc met a bloody fate at the end, & it appeared that the three members of his pathetic creation were also doomed, so it was hard to grasp how a sequel would work.

Here’s how: The protagonist of The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), opening today at The Royale in Mesa, is Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a gnome-like attendant in a featureless & very poorly supervised London “car park” (parking garage). Martin lives in a shabby little flat with his horrible ratbag of a mother (Vivien Bridson), who blames her son for the imprisonment of his sexually abusive father. His other roommate is a large centipede in a terrarium, which his loathsome psychologist (Bill Hutchens) suggests may be a phallic symbol representing his rage over his father’s abuse.

Martin obsessively watches Human Centipede the first on his computer screen at work, & keeps a scrapbook devoted to the film. He even takes seriously the movie’s tongue-in-cheek hype line: “100% Medically Accurate.”

Indeed, Martin seems determined to put this claim to the test. He keeps abducting people, & secreting them, bound & gagged, on the floor of a rented warehouse. His victims include customers who are rude to him at the car park, among others—he even lures Ashlynn Yennie, one of the actresses from the first film, to London with the offer of an audition for Quentin Tarantino.

Martin’s plan is to construct his own, highly ambitious human centipede, this one consisting of twelve subjects. The second half of the film is excruciatingly devoted to his efforts to complete this gruesome task—without, of course, any surgical skills or training & with workshop tools instead of surgical instruments.

So, how to review this thing? It’s both so revolting—it’s much, much more graphically gory than the first film—& so ridiculous that I found much of it almost unwatchable, & might have shut it off if I wasn’t reviewing it. I can’t say I found it particularly enriching, or that I think the world would be a notably poorer place if it didn’t exist.

Having said that, I must admit that this is by no means an artless piece of moviemaking. In some ways, it’s perhaps a more unified, less obviously padded-out piece of work than the original. Six achieves a despairing, Dante-esque horror at times, in the images of Martin’s writhing victims.

Harvey, too, is a potent presence as Martin. Unless I missed it, he never speaks a word in the film, but he has the unsettling stillness of a Beckett clown, & his face can erupt with homicidal rage or grief or glee. He’s one creepy little nudnik.

I wouldn’t blame any critic who didn’t care to split the hair that separates The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) from blackhearted torture-porn trash. But I will; I can’t quite dismiss the movie as that. I can acknowledge, at some level even admire, Six’s talent, & the transgressive vision that gave rise to this ghastly worm-that-turns fantasy.

But that doesn’t mean that I enjoyed it, or that, to anyone other than a hardcore-horror completist, I’d recommend it. Six got what he wanted out of me with this movie—he won. As with A Serbian Film a few months ago, at some point I gave up on these victims & just wanted the movie over. I just barely was able to, you know, leg this one out.