The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) Starring Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie & Akihiro Kitamura Written & Directed by Tom Sixa

When it comes to the film, it seems to me that a lot of film makers out there are always trying to push the envelope and come up with the next big gross out. We are at a point right now that if you have a big enough budget you could technically create any sort of cinematic abomination possible. Well you can do that without a budget also, but that's an entirely different kind of abomination.

Although more prevalent in Eastern cinema, this trend is catching on in the west and gaining popularity each year as film makers around the globe attempt to find the next big gross-out to one-up the last guy. Coming up with the most sadistic or twisted thing they can imagine. I've seen a lot of these films, I've sat through SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS, or one of Bill Zebub's rape fantasy films like KILL THE SCREAM QUEEN or BREAKING HER WILL, and be left wanting. I'm not shocked, and at least in the case of SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS, I was bored to tears.

Basing your movie on some shock-value premise alone is going to bore me to no end, and that gets your on the list (and yes, there is a list.)

Case in point, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like to present my case against THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE), a film written and directed by Tom Six, a man who at least one person on the Internet Movie Database calls "Holland's worst director" (Which is I am sure a scathing indictment that will ruin his career forevermore, because as we all know, someone hating you on the internet = the kiss of death.)

When I first heard about this movie, I thought it was a joke. A friend of mine came up to me one day at my usual bar and says to me "Dude, you have to see this fucked up movie I heard about!" To be honest, I didn't really believe him, so I'm like "Okay, try me." So he explains it to me like this: "Well it's this movie about this madman who captures these girls and sews their mouths to each others butts to make a a human caterpillar."

At this point I am taking a sip off a pint of beer, and I end up launching a torrential spray in one of the most epic spit takes of my entire life and start howling with laughter.

"What's so funny?" They ask, as if they didn't know. Once the braying laughter subsided and I composed myself a little more I responded "You're telling me that someone made the first ass-to-mouth horror movie?" To which he responded "Well, yeah I guess they did."

YOU NEVER GO ASS-TO-MOUTH!

I just couldn't believe it, I thought this had to be some low budget flop out created by either by someone with a really sick sense of humor (like me) or is some creepy pervert that is turned on by the idea of streamlining a system of poop-eating. However, I dismissed it as some fringe film that I probably would never see or hear from again.

But I just kept on hearing about it. People kept on telling me over and over about this "really gross movie that I have to see" that they heard about. The funny thing is, they wanted me to watch it and let them know how bad it was. Like I was the acid test or something. But I still didn't go out to seek this movie. Then in the April 2010 issue of Rue Morgue Magazine there was a three page article about this movie. Okay, enough is enough, clearly the whole world wants me to see this movie. But I'm warning you, I have high expectations.

However, I decided that instead of just watching the movie and reporting to my friends what I thought about this movie, I decided to tell the whole damn internet, and that little Timmy is why I chose the HUMAN CENTIPEDE as my inaugural article for BthroughZ.com. You're welcome.

The film stars Dieter Laser (Yes, that's his real name) as Dr. Heiter, a renown surgeon known for his skill with separating Siamese twins. Well for some reason that is left unexplained Dr. Heiter has become obsessed with linking three beings together into Siamese triplets. Connecting the organisms, if you haven't already figured it out, by linking their mouths to their anuses. He first tries it out on his three rottweilers, who don't survive so he buries them in his backyard (marking the grave "My Sweet 3-Dog" how cute.) With his initial attempt a failure, he decides to try it again: this time with humans.

He starts by capturing a trucker while he's making a road side delivery of processed goods that are certainly not meant for any store. This is our opening sequence in the film, a creepy German doctor sneaking up on a fat truck driver taking a dump and kidnapping him.

I'm going to interject here for a moment and talk about Tom Six's inspiration for this film. As internet lore tells me apparently this all started as a joke that Tom Six came up with in response to what sort of punishment he would give to a terrible criminal like, for example, a pedophiles. The idea he came up with was to have their mouths surgically grafted to the ass of a fat truck driver. While the idea of a pedophile chomping down on the anal biscuit of a trucker who possibly subsists on Taco Bell and Whiskey would be appealing, it would hardly make a good premise for a horror film... But he went with it anyway.

Right, so back to the plot... Cue the attractive women who will be part of the ass-to-mouth daisy chain that is called the Human Centipede. American tourists Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are trying to find their way to a hip dance club that they heard about somewhere on the German country side. What happens next is a cliché right out of a horror movie text book.

Let's play count the cliché:

1.)They get lost.
2.)They get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere.
3.)There is no cell phone signal.

The only help that comes by is a big fat perverted German guy in a wife beater. This is the only fresh permutation of the concept of attractive women being stranded someplace where awful things are going to happen to them. The guy (speaking in German) thinks the girls are from some porno movie that he has and is asking them to go back to his place so they can bump uglies. The whole time they're trying to ask the guy to help them with the whole flat tire thing. When they realize buddy is trying to get in their pants they roll up the window and ignore the fat bastard as he makes obscene gestures and eventually gets bored and drives away.

Then it's back to our regularly scheduled horror movie cliché. The girls decide to go out and try to find help. Get lost in the woods and just as it starts raining find a house and go banging the door for help. Of all the houses they could go to, they call on the one owned by Dr. Heiter's.

I'm going to interject again for a moment, and point out how Heiter's name is almost the same as Hitler. That is no coincidence. Tom Six is from the Netherlands, which for those of you who are ready for a history lesson (Boy Howdy I sure am!) was occupied by the Nazi's during the war. It was also where a lot of Joseph Mengele's Nazi experiments occurred, one of which involved literally sewing twins together. This is not the only reference to World War II that is made in the film, but more on that later....

So they are invited into Heiter's home, and right off the bat they find the guy kind of creepy, however their being stranded and this is the only house they found, so why not stick around right? Well the only beverage that Heiter has to offer is water and as he goes into the kitchen and pretends to call the car rental company to get the girls some help. He drugs their water with Rhoipnol (aka Flunitrazepam, aka the date rape drug.) While Jenny drinks all her water, Lindsay accidentally spills hers causing Heiter to go into a fury before going to get a towel.

As the girls discuss the idea of leaving, Jenny begins to get sleepy and the good doctor goes into his basement (where the trucker is all bound up) to get a towel and a hypodermic needle full of something that I can assure you isn't for anything good. Of course he tells the girls exactly what he did and injects Jenny before she can get away.

Now, I'm watching this whole sequence and Dr. Heiter is giving all sorts of signs that he's pretty messed up in the head. Now if all the paintings of conjoined twins don't set off alarm bells, when he says "I DON'T LIKE HUMANS!" when you ask him if he has a wife, you might want to reconsider sticking around or accepting an offering of a beverage. But I have to keep reminding myself that in horror movie logic, it doesn't matter how crazy your host may seem, you need to get a ride out and just plain leaving and finding help elsewhere just does not make sense.

The next day the girls wake up to find themselves strapped to hospital beds next to a fat trucker with a gag over his mouth, and they react in a way you'd expect: They freak out. The doctor comes in and after assessing the situation decides that the trucker is a bad match to pair up with these ladies and gives him a lethal injection. Much like his beloved 3-Dog, the trucker finds himself planted in Heiter's garden. I wonder if he got his own tombstone as well? My money says that it would probably read "My Sweet Ham-Trucker."

So Heiter goes out and finds himself another potential victim, this being in the form of a Japanese male (Akihiro Yennie) who only speaks Japanese. They don't explain how he gets the strapping Asian male, but I'm not going to split hairs at this point.

This brings me to my third interjection, the purpose of Tom Six choosing an Japanese male and two American women. Again a reference to World War II, he wanted to have a whole theme with that, and what better way to add a World War II theme than having a Japanese male crap in the mouth of an American woman. But there were also some cinematic purposes which will become apparent later.

So he has the Japanese guy strapped into the bed freed up by the trucker, and this guy is pissed when he comes around. He starts screaming stuff in Japanese (and you better believe they provided us with subtitles) and he has some of the more ridiculous lines in the whole film. While struggling to get free from his restraints he even says "Japanese possess unbelievable strength when backed into a corner." You can bet that theory didn't pan out to well.

What happens next is finally Plot Point #1: After giving the characters a run down of his credentials, the doctor turns on an overhead projector and explains what he is going to do to them. Yeah, the first plot point of the film is an lecture on overhead about how he's going to surgically attach the three people ass-to-mouth. The characters in the film are horrified, meanwhile, I'm here on my couch laughing my ass off. I couldn't keep it together through this part, it was the drawings on the overhead projector. All I could picture was how they resembled the type of crap my grade school teachers would draw on their projectors to teach us multiplication tables or the proper use of adverbs in a sentence. So I'm envisioning this guy teaching a class of 25-30 Grade 5 students how he's going to pluck out peoples teeth, graft their mouths to the anus of the person in front of them, and cut the tendons in their legs... Guess you had to have been there.

Interjection number four: just to give you an idea how much thought Tom Six put into this; he actually consulted a doctor on this to figure out if such a surgery was actually viable. Apparently it is. I can't wait for some nut to try and copycat this in real life. Could you imagine Joseph Lieberman trying to protest this film after some disenfranchised teenager tries to imitate it?

So after his little display is done and over with, our man Mr. Heiter goes about administering shots to put his patients under. However, as he is putting out both Lindsay and Katsuro, Jenny manages to loosen her bonds and make a break for it. Note to aspiring escapee: I know that it is a situation of emotional distress and you're fearing for your life, but for future reference when you're escaping from the hospital bed a madman has forcibly tied you too, you might want to consider removing the IV drip before you make a break for it. Jenny forgot, and it leads to one of the only cringe worthy gore effects in the whole movie: The IV gets ripped out and blood splatters at the camera. The only reason I even got the cringes is because I hate needles.

So she makes a break for it, locks herself in Heiter's room and attempts to defend herself with a lamp. When she refuses to open the door for Heiter (Come on man, seriously, with a sell feature like "I'm going to pull out your teeth one at a time" she's not going to throw the door open for you like you're a long lost lover!) Heiter goes outside and smashes the window to get at her. She flees further down the house and ends up in his indoor pool. Now when she refuses to get out of the pool Heiter simply closes the pool cover over her in an attempt to drown her. Once the pool is covered, for no explainable reason, the power goes out and Heiter leaves the room.

During this whole sequence, Heiter tells her that he's decided to make her the middle person in her human centipede. He must really like her to give her such a prestigious position, because as we all know, first is the worst and second is the best.

Jenny takes this as a moment to make an escape. Now, let's stop here and consider for a moment what's happened. Heiter has left her alone, there is a gaping hole in the window she can escape out of. You'd figure logic would bring you to get the heck out of there and find help. But no, she goes downstairs to pull Lindsay out. Now, it's all great that you are loyal to your friend and all, but carrying her unconscious body out with you is just slowing you down. If she had half a brain she would have made a break for it and come back with the police to save her friend. Ah, but we have to follow the clichés now don't we? So of course, once she struggles to drag Lindsay outside she is tagged by a dart fired by Dr. Heiter and she is once more made his prisoner. Some rescue.

What follows next is Dr. Heiter's surgery on his patients, and this is where I will actually give Tom Six some credit. It is my opinion that these days film makers show too much to the audience, which does not leave much for the imagination. What I feel always works with horror films is what makes a scene is what you don't see. Provided it's executed correctly, for example, if you the viewer cares what happens when a character is getting mutilated/killed/cornholed/forced to watch a Barbara Streisand movie. So he kind of faltered on the caring about the characters thing, at this point in the movie I'm shaking my head at how monumentally stupid they've been up to this point, but the suspense did build up quite nicely.

So you don't see the whole surgery, obviously, but they show you enough to make you feel slightly uncomfortable. There is a shot of Dr. Heiter pullig out teeth, cutting tendons, cutting the skin around the ass, sewing skin to a face. All this is spliced together with shots of Heiter taking breaks to relax, and full on shot of the progress of his creation.

Finally we get the big reveal: The Human Centipede in all it's glory.

And it's not really all that impressive.

It's pretty much all three characters stark naked except for hard diapers that their faces are attached too. They have bandages around their mouths and knees, and they're all plugged into IV drips. This of course, is because without the IV's person 2 and person 3 in this human centipede would ultimately starve to death, because - who would have guessed - you wouldn't get much out of being forced to eat someones crap.

Now as our three victims are freaking out, Dr. Heiter is crying with joy over his success as he takes pictures of his work. Then he puts them in a cage for the night. Which makes me wonder: How did he get them in there? I don't know about you people reading this, but if some German asshole did this to me, I'd be less than willing to be led into a cage. I'd be pretty pissed off and spoiling for a fight, wouldn't you?

What happens next is Heiter trying to turn his human centipede into an obedient pet, much like his late lamented 3-Dog. However, our characters are less that willing to play fetch or eat out of a dog bowl. However, biology get the better of them and up comes the moment that most of us been waiting to happen: Katsuro has to take a shit.

Now, this happens at the oddest of times, it's in the middle of a training session and of course Heiter's subjects are less than willing to follow orders. Suddenly Katsuro shouts out (with no rhyme or reason) "I got to shit! I got to shit! Forgive me!" and then starts to pray as Lindsay is then forced to sweallow his waste, Heiter watching with glee as you see her swallow with disgust.

That's pretty much it, and that's the only time it's ever addressed. Surprisingly, I found myself a little disappointed by this. I mean it's not really something I wanted to see, but I knew that it was something that I'd have to endure watching this movie, and in the end it all seemed kind of anti-climatic. I guess I'm used to the Troma school of thought where if someone is going to end up with a mouth full of poo, it's going to a torrent of chocolate pudding with corn in it.

It's pretty clear how the notion of having that concept in the story was a gross-out gimmick that really didn't play out so much since they never go back to it again. I suppose all the future pooping is implied, either that or Jenny lucked out and never got her hot lunch.

Well perhaps Jenny isn't that lucky, because her wounds are not healing that well and are getting infected, prompting Dr. Heiter to decide that she needs to be replaced with someone more vital. Wouldn't you know it, that's provided by Plot Point #2: The police come a calling.

This happens at a time when his abomination is down in his basement, where it is sound proofed so the two cops who show up can't hear Heiter's victims. The cops are Detectives Kranz (Andreas Leupold) and Voller (Peter Blakenstein) who are investigating the disappearance of Jenny and Lindsay. They come knocking on the doctors door because one of the neighbors heard an American girl screaming in his backyard a few days earler.

No wait a second... His neighbors heard and were able to identify that an American girl was in his backyard, but they completely miss the fact that he had three people sown together at the ass parading around his back yard being forced to fetch newspapers?

So there is this tense moment where the officers attempt to explore Heiter's house and of course Heiter is getting agitated and totally giving himself away. He tries the drugging them with roofies in the trick, but that doesn't and the cops leave to go get a search warrant after Heiter knocks a glass of water out of Kranz's hand and then when he goes for a towel to mop it up, accidentally drops his syringe full of tranquilizer on the floor (Whoops!)

In a panic, Heiter runs downstairs to hide his creation, however they've gotten down off the table and Katsuro attacks him with a scalpel, cutting his foot and then biting his neck. He then leads the girl up the stairs.

Going to interject again here: Six decided that he was going to include the Japanese character for the fact that the one person who could speak had a language barrier with the women who were connected to his ass, and also so there was a male character to fight the doctor.

So they're going up the stairs, which proves to be quite the challenge because it's a spiral stair case, and it causes the stitches in their knees to burst, and of course all the pulling and straining tares at the stitch work around their mouths and assholes. It's a slightly uncomfortable scene to watch, and I'll admit there is a bit of drama build up with Heiter coming around and slowly crawling up after them.

Our characters make it to the bedroom where Katsuro attempts to smash open the window again with a lamp, succeeding in only breaking a small piece of glass off. Which leads to the movies biggest what the fuck point, and also our films climax...

The doctor busts in with the scalpel in his hands, and Katsuro drops the lamp and opts to try and defend himself with a sliver of glass. Wait, what? You're telling me that you're giving up the big bludgeoning object for a tiny sharp object? What the hell is wrong with the people in this movie? That's like being up against an elephant and trading in your rifle for a BB Gun. Then, right out of the blue, Katsuo says:

"God. Are you God? I'm just a puny insect. I cast out my parents, left my child, dismissed their love and led a selfish life. Just like an insect. No, my existence is even lower than insects, but... but dear God... that's how I've lived, and this is my punishment. I want to believe that I'm still a human being... Hey girls! Hey mister! What an insane world we live in. "

Then he cuts his throat with the piece of glass.

WHAT. THE. HELL.

Okay, so let me get this straight: You pluck this character out of limbo, put him at the head of your human centipede and then at the end of the film you have him drop a load of exposition larger than the butt-snack he gave Lindsay earlier in the film, and then you kill yourself?

What an inconsiderate jerk.

I mean seriously, way to consult the ladies who are attached to you. I am sure that Lindsay really enjoyed chowing down on your death induced bowel movement as well. Also it's going to make it pretty hard to get away from the raving madman with the scalpel with all this dead weight in the front!! He goes through all this struggle to help the girls get away, even is so brazen as to attack his tormenter only to commit suicide when he's got his back to the wall? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

While this is all going on, Heiter has slipped away and is hiding out in his pool room and the two detective have returned and forcibly entered the home. Voller begins to succumb to the partial dosing of Rohipnol that he received earlier and is killed by Heiter. Kranz finds Heiter and is shot a few times in the gut before he gets a full head shot on Heiter.

So yeah, all the would be rescuers are killed, but hey look on the bright side Heiter's dead and I'm sure more help will come, Jenny and Lindsay will get away alive - granted they'll probably be disfigured for the rest of their lives but.... oh wait, there's more movie? Okay let's see what happens!

So the camera goes back to Jenny and Lindsay, and oh, if things weren't bad enough Jenny dies due to complications of the procedure, leaving poor Lindsay in the middle of a dead person sandwich. The camera pans away and the credits roll.

So... THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) is not as graphic as it was made out to be. It's not that gross, and while it has suspenseful moments, it is mostly annoying with it's typical horror film clichés, characters exhibiting all levels of stupidity, and of course there is that ending. It's right out of left field, and makes no sense in contrast to everything leading up to it.

But what can you really expect from a film who's genesis was the product of a juvenile joke, and put together based on a gimmick. It's not a bad film, but it's just not that good and is at times boring. I counted at least four times I was spinning my finger in a "get to the point motion" which is something I do when I get annoyed with anything that is taking longer than it needs to.

So, in summation, THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) is not a huge gross out as you may think, it can even be watched by those who are a little sequeemish, but don't expect to see anything you haven't seen from a horror-suspense film outside of people being sewn together at the ass and mouth.

Before I wrap things up, I'll also have you know that Tom Six is now working on a sequel to THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE, this one being titled THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FULL SEQUENCE) due out in 2011. From the press I've read, Tom intends on having a human centipede made out of 12 people instead of 3. Way to outdo yourself.