If you are reading this expecting some kind of endorsement of this film, you will not find it. There are people on IMDB who believe, apparently wholeheartedly, that this was a well done movie. It somehow warranted 4.1/10 stars as an average rating, and surely not every 10/10 score was a troll review. There are people out there who liked this movie and want to see more like it.
After viewing Human Centipede II (HC2 for short), I was left with the impression that Producer/Director Tom Six made it purely as an experiment, some attempt to see what people would watch and what kind of content they would clamour for. My understanding is that HC2 took about $140,000 at the Box Office (worldwide!), and unless the players in this grotesque assault on our sensibilities worked for under $5k apiece, I have to assume it did not recoup it's costs.
So why on earth is there demand for a 3rd? Why is a third being produced? Why are people watching the progress of the third instalment with such eagerness? Tom Six has declared there won't be a fourth, and I assume that this is because he expects to be tried in the Hague
Don't get me wrong. I am not naturally squeamish. I mean there are certainly some things I can't tolerate, like eye trauma - something that will affect me regardless of setting and presentation, be it Hostel or Happy Tree Friends. A small mercy I can be thankful for is that eye trauma is something HC2 does not explore - as far as I can tell, the only thing.
I have seen HC1. I have seen the first 5 SAW movies. I have seen Hostel. Although these movies are classed as little more than 'torture porn', sometimes I want to be grossed out or a little shocked. Usually I watch these movies with my wife, because she is a huge horror fan. These days there is little that scares us in the traditional sense, so... she seeks out other ways to be horrified.
In one evening we watched HC1 and 2 back to back, and while I already knew the premise of HC1 (who didn't?), I still found the movie appropriately weird and gross and appealed to my morbid curiousity. The Doctor in the movie was creepy enough to be interesting, even though there is no real explanation given for his actions. He became world-famous as the foremost surgeon in separating conjoined twins, and for some reason this inspired him to conjoin people via one digestive tract.
When I was 10 years old a friend of mine once told me a story that he swears was "absolutely 100% cross my heart and hope to die" true, about a doctor who got a boy and a girl and he forced the boy to put his penis in the girl's vagina and then cut their skin so they they would heal together and stay conjoined like that forever. Considering this is the basic technique HC1 subjects would be conjoined ass-to-mouth 17 years later, I'm wondering if he had something to do with these movies. Shawn, buddy, if you remember me from Auburn North Primary, drop me a line and let me know.
At this point it might be clear I am delaying actually talking about HC2. I have done movie recaps previously and I want to be clear that while I am somewhat recapping HC2, I am doing so from memory, after one viewing, in an attempt to purge this from my mind and serve as a cautionary tale to the rest of you. I have tried to articulate that I, as an open minded person of a reasonably strong constitution, was repulsed by this movie in almost every way it is possible to be repulsed. I want to remark again that in spite of this, they are making a Human Centipede 3, which while it apparently stars the same villain of HC2, will be set in a Nazi Prison camp and involve a 500-person centipede.
If that stirs some kind of curiousity in you, keep reading, so I can explain in detail (but not too graphically) why this is a bad idea, based on my experience with HC2.
As a point of interest, HC2 is 99.9% black and white, and opinions are divided as to why. What we know is that it was shot in colour, and changed to black and white in post-production. Some people believe that this was a style choice by Tom Six, and makes the movie scarier. I am more inclined this was obviously an attempt to get by the UK
The movie begins with scenes from HC1, being watched on a laptop by Martin, our lead player and villain, working what I assume to be the graveyard shift in a parking garage in London. He's an ugly, short, obese, mentally impaired man who has weird bug out guys and droopy lips that immediately give you the vibe that in addition to being retarded, he is also broadcasting a massive creepy vibe. For the record, Martin never has any dialogue, he only grunts and, occasionally, laughs.
So it is made clear that HC1 was in fact a work of fiction in the "world" of this movie. The actors and actresses were not harmed, they were performing in a movie. The Human Centipede is not a thing that was actually undertaken by anyone at any point.
However, Martin is obsessive. He watches the movie constantly. He keeps a large scrapbook with a Human Centipede movie poster taped to the cover, filled with sketches and photographs, and the almost hilarious note on the inside cover that declares that the movie was "100% MEDICALLY ACCURATE", something I am certain that a mentally impaired parking garage attendant is an authority on. We don't see the scrapbook until later, but I'm really only going to give this movie the most basic of rundowns, so it's not important. He also has a pet centipede that pops up occasionally.
In any case, Martin is inspired and wants to make his own centipede. In short, he captures people by sneaking up on them in the parking garage, knocking them out with a crowbar, and tossing them in the back of his van. Given that the police are never seen to come looking for any of the missing people, I am going to give the movie some credit here and assume that the events of the movie happen over a span of maybe 2-3 days.
Throughout the first half of the movie Martin receives voicemail messages from talent agencies that indicate that Martin was trying to secure the participation of the three victims of the movie by pretending he has a role for them in a Tarantino movie. As it transpires Akihiro Kitamura (the front piece) and Ashley C. Williams (middle) are not available, but Ashlynn Yennie (the end part) is available and thrilled to work with Tarantino - so in reality we have to assume she was the only person willing to associate herself with this movie. Checking IMDB it seems Ashley really did have a lot of work, so I'll give her credit. Akihiro was less busy, but I can appreciate why he would have preferred not to appear.
Ashlynn on the other hand was clearly a lot more eager for any kind of work, but things seem to have picked up for her more recently, so I guess doing this movie was a worthwhile gamble.
So we have our premise. 11 civilians and one actress are forcibly held hostage so a crazy man can bring his dream to reality. While fantasizing about his dream, Martin masturbates with sandpaper, and seeing him wrap the sandpaper around his penis and begin tugging, later urinating blood as a result, is the tamest thing this movie has to offer.
Ultimately Martin only has 10 people to make his centipede with, because he accidentally kills two of them (or so he thinks), because apparently repeatedly beating people over the head with a crowbar to keep them unconscious is not conducive to their wellbeing. By the way, one of the people he 'kills' was pregnant, so there's clearly no lines this movie won't cross.
There are some plot elements involving a creepy psychiatrist Martin has sessions with, an abusive father and upstairs neighbour, a psycho controlling mother, but none of these plot elements ultimately matter or provide any kind of justification for Martin's character or the plot, they simply provide targets to outlet Martin's perversity.
So here's the breakdown: Martin has to connect ten people ass-to-mouth, with no surgical skills, knowledge, or tools. So he assembles a kit of pliers, knives, pruning shears, a hammer, a staple gun, some rubber tubing and a funnel. Are you squirming yet?
At first he attempts to copy the procedures undertaken by the doctor in the first movie by cutting open the knees of his unconscious and ducttape-bound subjects, pulling out the ligaments, and cutting them with scissors. You can safely assume all of these procedures result in the waking up of the victims, and much gagged screaming.
The victims also have to have their teeth removed, which is where the hammer comes into play. Instead of sedating his victims and tugging them with pliers, he just smashes their teeth in. In the unrated cut this goes on far too long and was nearly my breaking point. For reasons beyond my understanding, my wife didn't turn the movie off this point (in spite of my protests) so I beat down my nausea and kept viewing. I know I was free to stop watching, I wasn't being subjected to the Ludovico method here, but I did not.
Judge me as you will.
This grisly process complete, Martin sets about preparing his victims to be joined. Now while in the original this was a delicate process involving grafting the flesh together, Martin immediately butchers this process with his first candidate, most likely severing an artery as blood flows freely from the wound and the man dies, which I am sure is a small mercy for him.
As Martin realises he cannot undertake this procedure with the same finesse as the Doctor in the movie, he compromises by lining his victims up and stapling their lips and assholes together. No surgery, just straight up stapling, reinforced with more duct tape.
Martin places some food in a bowl on the floor in front of Ashlynn (who is the lead piece of this centipede) but she refuses to eat, and cusses him out a bit, to which he responds by ripping out her tongue with pliers. After this, he forcefeeds her via funnel (and around 6 feet of rubber piping forcibly shoved down her throat) and begins his imitation of the doctor's inspection of their digestive process, trying to encourage them to shit, because of course, that's the whole point. Sadly, no amount of belly rubs will compel them to do so, so he injects liquid laxative into their behinds. Now the bottle clearly says oral laxative, but he is clearly injecting it into their rears, not their mouths, I don't care what anyone in the IMDB forums say.
This quickly take effects and farting noises serenade the gleeful Martin as he dances around, cackling as his centipede finally results in the victims explosively shitting into each others mouths. Of course because thy are not surgically grafted together, there is some significant leakage which even splashes onto the camera - we deliberately and literally have shit flying directly into our figurative eyes as a result of watching this movie and maybe I should have just opened this recap with that and saved myself some time.
Would you believe it is HERE that we get our only appearance of colour in this black and white film? Go on, guess which colour is represented.
Once the centipede has finally finished it's bowel evacuation, Martin is apparently overcome with lust. He walks up behind his 10-strong chain of stapled people and picks up a piece of barbed wire from the floor, which he diligently and firmly wraps around his penis.
You know where this is going, but I'm still going to tell you.
He gets on his knees behind the rear-most victim and proceeds to rape her, with his freshly barbed penis. Again, this scene just keeps going, making sure we have multiple angles of this urgent thrusting into his screaming victim, including one from the front end of the centipede so we see the entire writhing mass of bodies in front of Martin as he pounds away.
So this reaches it's conclusion and Martin is slumped over his victim, I suppose enjoying the bliss of the afterglow and pride in his accomplishment, when suddenly the pregnant woman wakes up under a sheet where Martin had deposited her in the corner after she apparently 'died' earlier. She runs screaming from the room, Martin slow to react... and of course her water breaks, leaving her waddling down a corridor with a steady stream of fluid leaving a trail behind her.
She makes it outside and gets into a car left behind by one of Martin's victims, the landlord for the property he is using, and the keys are still inside, so she's home free right?
Well Martin is right behind her and starts banging on the windows, and she's screaming and... oh, she gives birth there in the footwell of the driver's seat, treating us to a shot from her POV so we can see the baby sliding out of her from above. Now I thought after all this maybe it would be stillborn, but I hadn't really begun to formulate these expectations given that I genuinely thought we'd seen the last of the pregnant woman until 30 seconds earlier. In any case, the baby is presumably meant to be alive at this point, because they have dubbed in sound effects of a baby's distressed crying starting up.
The woman puts the car into gear desperate to get away and presses down on the accelerator, which, of course, has the baby's head under it. We get a close shot of the baby's still-soft skull being crushed as she puts the hammer down and reverses away.
I am not making any of this up. This is something that was filmed and distributed and sold as entertainment.
Martin proceeds back inside and in his absence the centipede has broken apart in the middle and is crawling around in two halves looking for a way out. Angry and distressed by this turn of events, Martin takes out a gun and starts shooting them, one by one, starting with the victims in the back half and working his way up until he runs out of bullets.
Ashlynn at this point has managed to get to a light switch (despite still having several dead people stapled to her asshole) and turn out the lights before Martin can find something else to kill her with. The lights come back on and she smashes Martin over the head with his centipede tank, which also happened to be nearby. While he squirms on the floor, she picks up the centipede and the funnel and yes, she jams that funnel right up his ass, and drops the centipede into it.
Martin goes into a frenzy of screams and clutches his belly as presumably the centipede burrows deeper, biting him painfully along the way. At some point he kills Ashlynn by beating her head in with his crowbar, and then he leaves.
The End.
I was going to write a conclusion here, discussing what we learned from this experience, and discussing the film, but there is just nothing to discuss. People condemn toilet-humour or grossout comedies, but at least that stuff is mostly harmless and in ‘good fun’. This is grossout cranked to eleven, with no reprieve. I can’t fathom what the intention of this movie was or what kind of person Tom Six is, but if there isn’t a law enforcement agency somewhere keeping surveillance on him just in case, I’d be honestly surprised.
