The bloodier, freakier, campier, and a whole lot funnier sequel to the famous gross-out flick. Instead of being a straight-faced follow-up to The Human Centipede, this is an almost Bride of Frankenstein-like parody of it. It’s the wild midnight movie that the surprisingly timid original wasn’t. Writer/director Tom Six doesn’t even set it in the same world as the first film. Here, The Human Centipede is only a movie and there’s a mentally ill parking garage attendant in London who obsesses over it. He watches the DVD on repeat, keeps a scrapbook about it, and quietly dreams of making his own human centipede out of the warm bodies who pass in and out of his job everyday. The big difference here is that the bad guy in the first movie was a doctor who had charts, diagrams, scalpels, and general anaesthetics to realize his meticulous experiment; in this film, our parking garage clod barely knows what he’s doing and he uses staple guns, knives, hammers, duct tape, and pliers on screaming victims to make his even greater, and much gorier, human centipede.
In the middle of all the savage beatings, the teeth knocked out with hammers, the spurting blood, the anal incisions, the mouths stapled to anuses, the holes bashed into old ladys’ heads, the tongues yanked out, and a gloriously sick moment with a newborn fetus, this film sneaks in a message.
The message: Only the biggest idiots on Earth imitate horror films.
No evangelist, feminist, whiny reviewer, or member of the British Board of Film Classification—they originally banned this film in the UK—who complains about horror movies has ever made a stronger statement on the topic because, unlike them, Tom Six understands horror fans. Most horror fans are normal people who simply get a kick out of a simulated cinematic freak show. For those who go further than that and act on the things that they see in movies, Six equates them here to a sweaty, retarded, tub o’ lard who lives with his mother and masturbates with sandpaper.
Laurence R. Harvey is perfect in the lead role. He’s a bug-eyed Mr. Potato Head who looks like Udo Keir crossed with a giant baby. He doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in the whole film and he doesn’t need any. His alien face—Tom Six loves this guy’s face—darting eyes, and creepy smile tell you everything.
I was iffy on Tom Six after that first movie, but now I like him.