Film The Human Centipede

[ForEverAfter]

It's a film that people love to hate. Pretty much everybody knows what it's about before they see it; they go to see expecting to hate it, and - lo, and behold - they hate it. The world loves a villain. This film is very self-aware of what it is. Just as Uwe Boll is very self-aware of who he is. Films like The Human Centipede, Postal & Rampage may not be your cup of tea; but, let's face it, you are taking a sip just so you can turn your face up in disgust.

Centipede is a low-budget horror film. It cannot be compared to anything else in terms of acting quality, and other production values. If you genuinely compare it to the majority of bullshit teen-slasher cookie-cutter creepy-guy-lingering-in-the-shadows films, where the lights inexplicably go out at opportune moments and nothing even remotely makes sense - Centipede it is clearly a much better film. If you compare it to a Kubrick film, obviously it's crap. But it's not aiming for Kubrick. It is a low-budget, gross-out horror comedy.

It is better than Ashton-Kutcher-type films, in which male characters are tailor-made masturbation material for young sexually repressed girls.

It is better than lowest-common-denominator films like Adam Sandler's Jack & Jill.

Saying it is the worst film ever made is ridiculous. And people complaining that they want "the hour and a half back". Why did you watch it? It's not like you didn't know what it was. Why not turn it off after half an hour? The only reason I can think of is because you want to bitch about how bad it was. Like I said, the world loves a villain. Tom Six understands this. Uwe Boll understands this. They pander to a certain demographic. That is, people who put money in their pockets while simultaneously declaring "no money should go in this man's pocket!"

The joke is on you.

Personally, I think it's hilarious.

 

[freddy47]

i switched it off ten mins in the first time, deciding i wasn't drunk enough to tolerate them two girls' "acting". eventually got to it, 1/10. too many "you dumbass" moment for me to care about anyone's survival.

Once you get past the ridiculous/disgusting premise it really is just another standard idiotic horror movie with a little dark comedy mixed in.

I couldn't watch the whole movie. My friend kept trying to get me to stay and watch it but I just left. From what I have seen, there is one and only one good thing I can say about this "film." It's better than Alone in the Dark but then again that is not really saying much as 99.9% of films are better than that movie.

 

[ohshea]

I was in court today and before the judge walked in the bailiffs kept talking about the human centipede movie. I Googled it and am not so disgusted with the first movie as I am with the second. The second ones tag line is "100% medically inaccurate" a joke on how six claimed the first one to be medically accurate. The second one includes all the blood and feces absent in the first, also a more disturbing "doctor" who performs surgeries w out anesthesia or clean tools and has a few sick scenes including sexual gratification with sand paper and barbed wire. The movies also in black and white. Apparently a third and final sequence is in the making. So has anyone seen the second and is it as horrid as disgusting as I read?

Note: six claimed he used the generic horror film formula ( broke down car, naive girls) to make people think they were in for a typical horror movie and so the centipede idea would be all the more shocking

 

[MrGrunge]

Note: six claimed he used the generic horror film formula ( broke down car, naive girls) to make people think they were in for a typical horror movie and so the centipede idea would be all the more shocking

In other words, he's a lazy asshole.

 

[ForEverAfter]

Centipede is far more creative and watchable than most (95% of) low-budget independent horror films. While he's no Stanley Kubrick, Six made a unique film with Centipede. Most horror films are conceptually lazy. Centipede stands out not simply because it's shocking, but because it pushes the boundaries of what is considered to be obscene. There is a difference.

He's not lazy.

I really don't understand the amount of hate this guy receives. He made a horror film, way above average for it's budget. Not another generic slasher film with dumb blondes and faceless men lurking in the shadows. Centipede is a modern classic. It's one of the best, most original, horror films I've seen in the past ten years. In fact, I challenge anyone to name twenty better, or less lazy, horror flicks to come out that decade.

My Top 16, 2000-2009 (off the top of my head)

1. Anti-Christ.
2. Shadow of the Vampire.
3. Shaun of the Dead.
4. Planet Terror.
5. Inland Empire.
6. Drag Me To Hell.
7. Let the Right One In.
8. Sweeney Todd.
9. The Host. (Korean)
10. Zombieland.
11. Saw.
12. The Mist.
13. The Human Centipede.
14. Bubba Ho-Tep.
15. Willard.
16. Hostel.

 

[MrGrunge]

He had a "Hey, wouldn't it be gross and freaky if..." type moment and decided to shoehorn a limp-dick narrative around it and make a movie. Conceptually lazy? That's pretty much Human Centipede in a nutshell. It's all gimmick and no substance. Six is just another in a proud tradition of people getting rich by grossing people out. (a la Fear Factor, Saws 2 through 16, and a large portion of Youtube).

So a list of horror films better than Human Centipede? Man...I'm just gonna list as many as I can, or at least until I collapse from exhaustion.

NSFW:

1. A Tale of Two Sisters
2. Martyrs
3. The Devil's Backbone
4. The Descent
5. 28 Days Later
6. Anti-Christ
7. Audition (it was made in '99, but whatever)
8. Bubba Ho-Tep
9. Saw
10. The Others
11. Shaun of the Dead
12. The Host
13. I Saw the Devil
14. Session 9
15. Let the Right One In
16. Rec
17. Shadow of the Vampire
18. The Ring
19. The Grudge
20. Drag Me To Hell
21. High Tension
22. Dawn of the Dead
23. Willard
24. Blair Witch Project (another '99 release)
25. The Tunnel
26. Noroi
27. American Psycho
28. Battle Royale
29. Frailty
30. Hannibal
31. Ichi The Killer
32. Pulse
33. Dog Soldiers
34. Calvaire
35. Bug
36. Fido
37. The Hills Have Eyes
38. Ils
39. Funny Games
40. Irreversible
41. El Orfanato
42. The Mist
43. Sunshine
44. Eden Lake
45. The Midnight Meat Train
46. Shiver
47. Pandorum
48. Thirst
49. Triangle
50. Seven Days
51. Bedevilled
52. Buried
53. Shutter Island
54. Troll Hunter
55. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
56. The Cabin in the Woods
57. Birdemic: Shock and Terror

(Man, that took forever. I had to keep searching through IMDB to confirm release dates. 8()

And those are just movies I was at least moderately pleased with. There are still plenty of other bland, generic horror movies released in the last 12 years that I found more interesting and more coherent than Human Centipede, which seemed like a filmed version of an Urban Dictionary entry. All things considered, this past decade has been pretty good to the Horror genre, but I certainly wouldn't consider Tom Six's contributions to be noteworthy.

EDIT: I'm glad to see you added Bubba Ho-Tep to your list. I thought I was crazy for loving that movie, but it's good to see I'm not alone :D

 

[ForEverAfter]

Sunshine was okay. Pandorum was terrible. The Ring was shit. The Grudge was shit. The Midnight Meat Train was fucking horrible, and I love Clive Barker. He's like one of my favorite authors. Definitely my favorite horror author. So I liked Meat Train more than most. Still, it's nothing in comparison to Centipede. Meat Train vs. The Centipede? Are you fucking serious?

How did I forget Bug and Shutter Island? Bug is one of the most under-rated horror films of all time. Michael Shannon is fucking fantastic. Good old Friedkin.

People tend to do 11 year decades on the internet for some reason. "2000-2010" rather than "2000-2009". Tucker vs. Dale is Evil was produced in 2010. So are some of the others. Dale is a great film, though. It would be on my list.

I don't think you've been completely fair to Centipede.

But, as you said, you struggled to list 57 movies better than it.

How many horror movies are released every decade? 1000?

Therefore, better than: 95%, as i said.

(or close enough, anyway)

 

[ForEverAfter]

You're probably going to instantly dismiss me as an idiot for making this comparison, but Hitchcock made a large number of highly conceptual horror films with simplistic narratives. Obviously they're very different directors. Six is competent. And Hitchcock, while not the genius everyone claims he is, transcends competence. Hitchcock is extremely talented. Yet he makes horror films around conceptual gimmicks. Like, The Birds. Why? Because horror doesn't need an atypical narrative. Just get a bunch of birds to go crazy for no reason. Still, it's a great film. Like Birds, Centipede is a bold film, not a lazy film. Especially bold for a debut. From a genre void of imagination that churns out brainless cliched slasher films, it is a refreshing change. I'm not saying you have to like it. But it deserves some credit. At the very least it knows what it wants to be. It has a vision, and it achieves vision. Pretty impressively, considering the budget and quality of actors.

I've been on film sets.

Go out and try to make a Horror film, then tell me Six is lazy.

"Hey, wouldn't it be gross and freaky if..." type moment

Then he sat down and wrote a script, called casting agents, did auditions, organized other crew members and managed budgets. Then he directed it. If you've never attempted to direct a film with a budget you don't know how stressful it is. Amateur film-makers and crew members often work 18-24 hour days. It's exhausting. Especially when you're limited to amateur actors and you have to retake and retake and retake. Six went through all of this, day after day. Then he started editing his film. And selling his film. And doing interviews. Marketing.

All so he could make a film about sewing people's mouths to other people's assholes.

It's hard enough having enough confidence in your work to finish writing the fucking script, let alone independently producing directing and editing it. I'd wager that Tom Six had to work harder to make The Human Centipede than you, or I, have ever worked in our lives. It's extraordinary, if you really think about it, just how much confidence he had in the idea of sewing a mouth to an asshole. You say he's a lazy asshole. I say he's the biggest asshole enthusiast I've ever encountered.

His film is noteworthy. Whether or not that makes him a good film-maker is another question. The fact that he's producing sequels to his first film, indicates pretty strongly that he's not. But the film is good. It needed to be made. Like it or not, it has had a substantial impact. It is part of the equation. Part of the evolution of art and entertainment. We needed to see it. You might think it's a bad film. Maybe so. But it has a function. Final Destination 3 has little impact. Centipede is more significant a film, in terms of how it will influence cinema. It comes down to art versus entertainment. If you care more about out witnessing the expression than the impact it has. If you care more about how flowers smell, than pollination.

Art is expression. What we express should be true. Art, therefore, should serve to reveal repressed truths. Honestly, I think the film has serious potential in terms of symbolic interpretation. Although it relies on a single concept, the concept is loaded. Man eating the waste of man. A biological heirarchy. Society as slavery. Men and animals. Men as animals. I'm not saying that Six meant it to be particularly symbolic. But, it's not a coincidence. More like subliminal intertextuality.

Take "I Know What You Did Last Summer," conceptually, versus, "The Human Centipede." On one side you've got nothing. Stab stab. Young people. Scared. Some guy with a hook. On the other side, you've got a multi-racial surgically conjoined triplet that shares a single digestive system. Centipede had never been done before.

Throughout history we've mutated the human form into anthromorphs, demons, giants and dwarfs.

The only person who has come close to doing what Six did - that I'm aware of - is Vlad the Impaler. Who, I also have a lot of respect for. According to some sources, Vlad used to impale multiple people on single stakes. He used blunt rounded stakes. They'd work their way up inside the body cavity, sometimes while people were still alive, pushing organs out of the way. Then they'd burst out through the mouth and he'd ram them through another asshole. There were fields of these corpse kebabs, according to legend. Man to horse to woman. Asshole to mouth. Mouth to asshole.

Vlad is more famously the inspiration for Dracula.

Six, although achieving it fictitiously, went beyond prototype.

The people kebabs that Vlad had invented, Six made them real.

Doesn't matter if it happens in fiction or reality. All lines need to be pushed, forever towards infinity.

This particular line hadn't moved for almost 600 years.

Yes, for six long centuries Vlad has maintained the Guinness world record for nearly grafting the most people together from mouth to anus. Then, Tom Six came along and fictionally trumped him by experimenting on mediocre actresses like lab monkeys. He deserves your respect, damn it!

 

[poledriver]

Didn't bother finishing this, don't rate it.

 

[L2R]

i still don't like it. the concept is far from making up from the poor execution (only referring to the first one).

 

[ForEverAfter]

For a low-budget directorial debut, the execution is well above par.

 

[MrGrunge]

Sunshine was okay. Pandorum was terrible. The Ring was shit. The Grudge was shit. The Midnight Meat Train was fucking horrible, and I love Clive Barker. He's like one of my favorite authors. Definitely my favorite horror author. So I liked Meat Train more than most. Still, it's nothing in comparison to Centipede. Meat Train vs. The Centipede? Are you fucking serious?

I stand by every film I listed being at least marginally better than Human Cnntipede. Some more than others, obviously, but each one of those films has (or had, given when it was released) something that give the films substance and personality. I might be too generous with The Ring and The Grudge because I saw them when I was quite a bit younger, but I'd still rather watch either of those over Human Centipede. I liked the style of Midnight Meat Train. Sure, the narrative was kinda silly, and Bradley Cooper kinda sucks, but there was a certain aesthetic to the film that I found interesting.

People tend to do 11 year decades on the internet for some reason. "2000-2010" rather than "2000-2009". Tucker vs. Dale is Evil was produced in 2010. So are some of the others. Dale is a great film, though. It would be on my list.

I like to think that that aughts had a pretty distinctive approach to horror movies when compared with previous decades. Improvements in technology and special effects gave/give horror directors a lot more creative freedom than their predecessors. I tried to only include post-2000 movies in my list, with the exception of Blair Witch (included because of it's cultural relevance) and Audition (included because of it's awesomeness).

I don't think you've been completely fair to Centipede.

I've seen the movie on three different occasions - I'd say I've been more than fair to it. I haven't even seen most Kubrick movies that many times.

But, as you said, you struggled to list 57 movies better than it.

Not at all! I had plenty of movies to choose from, the only difficulty came from double-checking release dates.

How many horror movies are released every decade? 1000?

Therefore, better than: 95%, as i said.

(or close enough, anyway)

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, then.

 

[Psychonautic]

Face down ass up thats the way she like ta... ewwww

 

[ForEverAfter]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, then.

No. I insist that you agree.

 

[MrGrunge]

And I disagree with your insistence of agreement.

 

[ForEverAfter]

No you don't.

 

[MrGrunge]

Darn, you got me. Human Centipede is a masterpiece. I might as well stitch my mouth to your anus now that I've just swallowed your shit

 

[ForEverAfter]

Sadly there's not enough room.

So many mouths to feed, and only one anus.

 

[L2R]

enter japanese remake. polyanus is an actual genre over there.

 

[L2R]

ok, THC (teehee) was probably funny since you guys were in the right mood, like the one i was in which made me find Snakes of a Plane so hysterical.