"The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" A Movie Review

I'd first heard about Tom Six's "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" via Internet buzz, with post after post about how this was the movie that dared the viewer to watch it. With a premise that's simple enough -- a retired Siamese twin surgeon decides to stitch three young people together mouth to anus joined by a common digestive tract -- I think that this movie would have made a much better first-person narrative novel. Perhaps it was the watered-down Wal-Mart version that we were able to get our hands on (it's not the easiest thing to find a video store where I now live in the country), but I still hold the same opinion of the movie that I held before I'd even watched it. I'm sure there's an unrated version out there, but I doubt it would've changed my mind.

If I were to walk up to you and pitch this gruesome idea, wouldn't the image that I've stained onto your mind already be enough? What more would there be to show on screen? And after watching the movie, I kept my resolve on this conclusion. I'm thinking that what would have made this story much more frightening in a psychological horror kind of way would have been to maybe get it from the perspective of "B" -- as she was referred to in the movie -- the middle section of the centipede and according to the demented surgeon (played with unsettling method skill by German actor Dieter Laser), the absolute worse part of the gig. But I don't think we needed him to tell us that.

However, it's still a good-looking piece of work, especially the almost performance-art way in which we see the centipede crawling around the grounds of the post-modern house, joined together like a living sculpture.

---