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The movie certainly has become quite the flashpoint among movie geeks this season: "Disgusting and brilliant" in a dead heat with "disgusting and worthless." I'll pitch my tent in the former camp — and, like many another horror film, Human Centipede really isn't as disgusting as all that. Even in the now-legendary coprophagy scene, we don't actually have to watch it in detail. It's kind of hard to, when the eater's mouth is sutured to the shitter's ass.

Still with me? Here we have one of the great simple horror plots: two college girls (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) on a Eurotrip find themselves waylaid by a flat tire. They wind up at the house of one Dr. Josef Heiter (the wonderfully named Dieter Laser), a mad surgeon who dreams of creating an organism joining three human bodies with one digestive system. The ads boast that the film is "100% medically accurate." I'll take that on faith; who would really want to investigate further into the claim?

Anyway, the girls are joined to a third person, a Japanese man (Akihiro Kitamura), the "lead" in the centipede. Writer/director Tom Six, who has previously made several Netherlands farces, keeps the style creepily clinical, almost becalmed, as if in response to the lurid premise. Occasionally the soundtrack gives itself over to an ominous doomy rumble, but mostly it's a very quiet film other than the shrieks of the victims pre-op, the muffled cries of the girls post-op. We watch the human centipede awkwardly making its — their — way around the house or the yard, at the behest of the mad doctor, who tries to train them like a dog.

Some people, many of whom have not seen the film, are taking great pains to denounce Human Centipede, and anyone who could conceivably enjoy it, as sick and depraved. We've heard this before. The truth is, anyone familiar with some of the more squirm-worthy Japanese manga will have seen atrocities very much like those on display here, and worse. What's new is Six's fastidious approach, which takes us up to the edge of nausea and dread. And the scenery-gnashing Dieter Laser creates a terrific new screen monster, who weeps in triumph when his great creation is revealed. The movie drips with twisted, absurdist humor — the deadpan presentation helps — but it ends on a truly chilling and desolate note. At a time when my beloved horror genre is infested with the fleas and ticks of remakes and "reboots," here's a movie that injects some new, ice-cold blood.

[1] I promise you this will be the only review of "The Human Centipede" that references Marguerite Duras. Her ghost is probably relieved.

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originally posted: 05/01/10 22:12:07
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