Recent studies have shown that the same part of the human brain “fires” when a person watches another person doing something as if the viewer himself was actually performing the task.  This is why people become fanatical over sports and video games. Horror has always functioned on the same principal, but instead of craving vicarious excitement, the viewer desires fear. Historically, directors have always fed their audiences’ fear by having the viewer identify with a character and then force that character to encounter abnormal bodily shapes or distorted faces. Everything from Romero’s zombies to rubber walking skeletons in a Vincent Price flick have tricked audiences to believing that danger was their own. While other movies rely on “jumps” and the recently, and unfortunately popular, torture-horror genre rely on tickling the wince reflex, every horror film functions on the infamous fear of fear itself.

While every horror film relies on the viewer becoming fearful of the same thing the character fears, last night’s viewing of Tom Six‘s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) had me struggling to decide if I could be afraid of being kidnapped by a crazy doctor and having my mouth sown to my friend’s anus, and having to digest the food that he eats out of another person’s anus. The Human Centipede pushes the boundaries of what a viewer can relate to, and after you’re done with this one you’ll either scratch your head and let out a long “oookay” or turn to whoever else is in the room and say “let’s never speak of it, again.”  However, I’m getting very far ahead of myself.

How do two dippy American girls get sown together mouth to anus to a Japanese dude they don’t know? Actually, this one starts off with very cliched format: Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are touring Germany on their way to a club when they get lost followed of course by flat a tire and a cellphone with no signal. Pretty standard. After an arugment full of dialogue that makes you glad they can’t speak for the entire second half of the movie, they set off for help. Somehow, instead of just following the road back, after the camera cuts you discover they’re both in the middle of the woods until they stumble upon a single house; and, yes, it is a dark and stormy night, but It really doesn’t matter how many cliches pile up here, because no one is every going to use “Centipede” and “unoriginal” in the same sentence.

As horrible luck would have it, the house happens to belong to the evil and eccentric Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser) who has ironically been waiting for two more people to sew to the guy he has in the basement already. What luck! The rest is standard. He drugs and binds the two girls and then, after a failed escaped sequence, does his newly developed procedure, which locks the knees into the bent position and attaches the three victim’s disgestive tracks together – say it with me this time – mouth to anus, mouth to anus. Fortunately for the Japanese guy he is chosen for the front, but the girls have the unfortunate task of having to “process” what he eats.

While this sounds like a cheap attempt to tickle the gag re-flex in a “two girls-a guy-a centipede and cup” sort of way, the film barely scraps the surface of the gross imagery that it has the potential to. The most tense scene, involves the Japanese man crying and begging for forgiveness in his native language as he announces to the girls that he “has to shit.” The girl in the middle’s cheeks puff a little and her throat muscles contract, but that’s as gross as it gets.

For some viewers, the implication of what’s going on here may be too much to take but the film rates pretty low on my disturbing meter. For one, Dr. Hieter makes the entire experience almost Monty Pythonish. He prances around in what a Nazi might wear to go horse back riding and a formed fitted lab coat while either kissing his own reflection or gloating over his creation while yelling stuff like ”Yes, Feed her!”  Either that or he’s just looming over the shot, hanging out and being creepy while looking like the love child of Christopher Walken and the Muppet “Sweetums.”

No matter how ridiculous the film becomes in its absurdist theater-meets-horror-kinda-way, Centipede still has a touch of realism that keeps you somehow believing the ridiclous spectacle you’re witinessing. Instead of making Heiter a Jigsaw-esque super villian that outsmarts the authorties, his insanity often causes him to be a bumbling out of control character. In fact, Heiter has been sloppy enough with his victims to earn the police attention before the film’s narrative even starts and many problems I had with the whole procedure in general were addressed. For example, I wondered, wouldn’t the last girl on the chain, either get poisoned or get a massive infection? Well, they actually go that route by having Jenny fall ill with a puss swollen face. In this aspect the film succeeds by introducing a flawed nut-case instead of tyring to create a new untouchable horror icon, the viewer can more easily acccept the pitter patter of a human centipede feet crawling through his brain. (However, there is a sequel in the works).                           

The finale to this whole-crazy-thang is kinda pulled out of someone’s ass–pardon the pun– as the Japanese lead-man confesses a shameful act and comits a unwarranted action but at that point you’re not going to question an unlikely twist. Trust me. Still, originality goes a long way these days, and this film certainly has lots of originality going on. I can’t say it had my fear receptors firing on all cylinders it but had a great freak show feel without flaunting gore and grossness for a cheap wince. Centipede is a peek into good old fashison insanity, and maybe it proposes a new kind of fear: a fear of wondering about what type unimagined suffering is possible in this world no matter how absurb….Nah! It’s probably the thought of these two getting it on to produce THAT!