99¢ Review: The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)

I watch a lot of movies (check out my list of movies seen in 2011), but I don’t always have the time to write up a full review for each one. Instead, I thought I would start up a new column where I give you the discount version of the review. The value menu of movie reviews, if you will. What’s good, what’s bad, if it’s worth your time.

The Good: Martin, blood, guts and gore, shot tastefully in black & white

The Bad: The story, the acting

Martin is a sick man. He’s mentally impaired, works an anonymous job as a parking garage attendant, has a weird mother and shrink, and is completely obsessed with The Human Centipede (First Sequence), so much so that he watches the film repeatedly and keeps a scrapbook of his favorite scenes, diagrams of the surgeries, and profiles of the actors. Martin decides that, while writer/director Tom Six’s tale of a mad surgeon creating a human centipede of three people sewn mouth-to-anus was pretty good, he can create an even better centipede. What follows is Martin’s attempts to build a twelve person centipede while using the first film, which claims to be 100% medically accurate, as a template.

The first ‘Human Centipede’ depended heavily on the performance of Dr. Heiter, a specialist at separating conjoined twins who decides that joining people together instead of separating them is more challenging. The sequel depends even more on the role of its mad doctor (Laurence R. Harvey as Martin), since he’s in about 95% of the movie and everything revolves around his unhinged persona. Give Tom Six credit, he’s found another creepy, disgusting, disturbing, vile, and completely memorable lead for his sequel. Everything Martin does is slightly, or sometimes completely, off kilter and unpredictable.

Want to get up close and personal with this guy?

Where the first movie was uncomfortable in part because the good Dr. Heiter used clinical precision in a sterile environment to construct his centipede quite purposefully, the second movie is uncomfortable because it’s the exact opposite. In the sequel, Martin isn’t a doctor and has only a vague sense of what he’s supposed to do. Collect twelve people. Sew mouth to anus. Go. This one is dirty, bloody, disgusting and far more painful than the first, simply because Martin isn’t capable of sorting out all the details of the procedure before he gets going. His idea of anesthesia, for example, is a crowbar to the head. That’ll keep ‘em still long enough to perform his surgery with steak knives and staple gun. All in all, this stuff works effectively to create an uncomfortable viewing experience.

What doesn’t work is the story. This thing plays out like a first draft of a screenplay. There are at least a dozen points in the film where the whole thing should have collapsed on itself and Martin’s experiment ended, yet the movie ignores these plot holes and trudges along gleefully. It’s unfortunate that the really cool, meta approach to the sequel, having Martin be a fan of the original film, is squandered by such a poor story. Tom Six is so focused on making you uncomfortable in every second of the movie that he completely ignores the story. In the end, however, the story doesn’t really matter here; it’s all about the gross factor, which is so high it’s off the charts.

What’s important is that the movie has a unique and mesmerizing lead and that it’s over-the-top violence delivers enough ‘OMG! Ewww!’ moments to keep you entertained. To that point, Tom Six has delivered. You’re going to need a shower after this film to wash the filth away, which is exactly the point of the movie.

1.5 out of 5 stars.  

Roger Ebert has this nice quote about the film: “The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency.”