Josh Bell is the film editor for Las Vegas Weekly.For all the people who were disappointed that Tom Six's 2010 The Human Centipede (First Sequence) wasn't disgusting enough, there's good news: Six's new The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) ups the gross-out factor tenfold, testing the endurance of even the most hardcore horror fans. For all the controversy surrounding it, the original Centipede showed surprisingly little; the new movie shows everything.
Six seems to subscribe to the idea that more is better, and the most dedicated Centipede fans may feel that way as well, although the movie is also perversely designed as a rather condescending critique of the devotees of extreme cinema. The villain here is not the refined, sadistic scientist Dr. Heiter of the first film (played with memorable relish by Dieter Laser), but a Human Centipede fan in the "real" world. Yes, Six's latest bad guy is one of his own followers, a fat, asthmatic, possibly mentally challenged parking-garage attendant named Martin (played by British stage actor and performance artist Laurence R. Harvey in his screen debut). Martin has, to put it mildly, kind of an unpleasant home life: He lives in a dingy London flat with his screeching mother (Vivien Bridson) and is haunted by memories of being sexually abused by his father (who's now in prison, a situation for which Martin's mother blames her son). Even the therapist who's allegedly trying to help Martin is a perverted creep.
The one bright spot in Martin's miserable existence? Why, it's The Human Centipede, of course, which he watches obsessively on his computer while at work and fantasizes about incessantly. He puts together a scrapbook of press clippings about the movie and its stars, makes his own drawings of Dr. Heiter's human-centipede diagrams and even keeps an actual centipede as a pet. Martin's greatest goal in life is to create his own human centipede, and thus he goes about collecting subjects in a much less methodical manner than Dr. Heiter did, clubbing random parking-garage patrons over the head with a crowbar and dragging them to an empty warehouse. While Dr. Heiter was meticulous and sadistic, Martin is sloppy and unhinged, and thus his efforts are much messier. Since he has no surgical knowledge beyond that imparted by the villain of a horror movie, Martin's centipede-creating methods involve dirty kitchen knives and a staple gun, not exactly the most sterile or effective medical tools.The first half of the movie is nearly convincing as a deliberately punishing art film, between Harvey's wordless performance (Martin never speaks a single line) and Six's decision to shoot in black and white. While the original Centipede wrapped its grotesquerie in a pretty conventional horror-movie plot, the sequel has no story whatsoever, just a series of violent scenes as Martin gathers up his subjects. Six even brings back original actress Ashlynn Yennie, this time playing herself, lured to London by Martin's promise of an audition for a Quentin Tarantino film. Those little meta touches are surely meant to be amusing, but they come off as more self-aggrandizing, with Six inflating the importance of his own film as a worthy subject for a feature-length deconstruction.
Once Martin gathers his subjects and gets around to the cutting and stapling, the movie loses all pretenses to art or social commentary, instead literally wallowing in blood and feces for a good 45 minutes. Six's version of Steven Spielberg's use of red in Schindler's List is to show the excrement in vivid brown, the only color in the otherwise monochromatic film. The whole thing ends with a cop-out twist that both invalidates the previous 90 minutes of punishment and makes explicit the fanboy critique that had been lurking in the background. If Six is now deliberately insulting and alienating his own fans, who will be around to watch The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)? With luck, no one.
