profoundly moving

About a year ago, I wrote this piece about The Human Centipede, a notorious horror film where a mad German scientist called Dr Heiter hatches a plan to join the human race together via their alimentary canal. Embarrassingly, I may have described Tom Six, the man responsible, as a ‘Dutch avant-garde director.’ A close inspection of his IMDB profile would suggest that the ‘avant-garde’ bit of that characterisation is a little fucking generous. He is Dutch though.

Aside from that small oversight, it was one of my favourite posts I’ve written for this blog – mainly because I got to repeatedly use the phrase ‘the gaping anus of Michael Winner.’

It is also one of the most successful. Last April the trailer was released on YouTube and the internet went batshit crazy. The clip got millions of hits and the phrase ‘human centipede’ became one of the most searched for topics on Google. Somehow the concept of nubile American tourists having their mouths surgically grafted into each others’ arseholes simply captured the imagination of the general public – it was this year’s Obama.

Suddenly, the traffic coming to my blog from people googling the film went through the roof making it my most read article ever (it also had an unprecedented 3 ‘likes’ on Facebook!) The lesson here is essentially that I should be writing a whole lot more posts about things like Britney Spears’s vagina, R-Patz and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Anyway, the film is released in cinemas in all its glory on the 20th August and last Thursday I got to see a preview..

So, it stared off well. The PR people organising the screening laid on some lovely sandwiches beforehand. They also thoughtfully placed a complimentary sick bag out on every chair. And they handed out this:

..a handy guide for all the budding gonzo journalists out there who fancied having a go at making a human centipede for themselves.

My favourite bit is this bit!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t go into too much detail about the ins and outs of skin grafts or ‘gastro-amalgamative surgery’. I tried phoning NHS direct to see if someone there could talk me through it – they were precisely NO help.

So what of the film? What of the actual film? Well, I mean, it was terrible, obviously. Of course it was. Absolutely appalling. Appalling script, appalling sound, appallingly shot (by a Director of Photography hilariously named ‘Goof De Konning’) and, in particular, appallingly acted.

It’s quite rare that you get to see really bad acting anymore. I’ve always assumed that saying stuff out loud that has been written down for you on a script and making it sound like an actual person is saying it in real life shouldn’t really be that difficult. They even seem to manage it on Hollyoaks for fuck’s sake.

Well apparently for some people it is. And specifically for Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie, who play the two American victims, it’s a massive challenge. They managed to mangle their way through their dialogue so badly that there was actually a palpable sigh of relief in the cinema when they were duly awarded positions two and three in the Human Centipede. It was disgusting, sure, upsetting and psychologically disturbing. But at least we didn’t have to listen to them speak anymore.

Interestingly, Ashley Williams’ performance dramatically improved from this point in. She has quite a curious acting range to be sure. Relatively straightforward techniques like, say, looking disappointed when her phone runs out of battery prove to be too much of a challenge and yet she manages to pull off an entirely convincing portrayal of having a Japanese man shit in her mouth.

I liked that Japanese guy (Akihiro Kitamura) and was glad he was given position #1 in the centipede pecking order. (Is ‘pecking’ the right word here? Maybe ‘reluctant ingesting’ or ‘distraught slurping’ might be more appropriate..) It also means he gets to do all the talking which is great as he has some fantastic lines which seem all the more funny when seen as an English subtitle: “The Japanese possess extraordinary strength when backed into a corner!” was a highlight. I also liked it when he calls Dr Heiter a “European Madman!”

The doctor, to his credit, shoots straight back with, “Shutup! Or I pull your teeth out one by one, you kamikaze shithole!” Boom! Smack down! You have been PWNED!!

It’s Heiter, the crazed German scientist, who inevitably steals the show here. He’s played by Dieter Laser, famous for his role in… nope, nothing, nothing’s coming up…. He does have an amusingly wrinkly little head though, that makes him look like a malevolent tortoise. Almost everything he says is laugh-out-loud hilarious. But then pretty much anything is funny when said in a camp ‘Allo ‘Allo Nazi accent. Especially the phrase; “Rohypnol – the rape drug”.

All this hilarity aside, there’s no escaping the fact that the film is truly truly terrible. However with the amount of interest and attention it’s been getting, there’s no way it won’t be successful. The main lesson we can draw from this is that human beings are essentially all massive morons. As long as your film has a premise with the sufficient LOL-factor, then it doesn’t matter how good or bad it is, we’ll still queue up like hungry worms to contentedly devour whatever shit you want to stuff down our throats.

Ooh, that gives me an idea for a movie..