Review: The Human Centipede (2010)

The Human Centipede
2010
92 minutes
not rated
Available on IFC On Demand on April 28th, in theaters April 30th.

by Scott Mendelson

The Human Centipede is a textbook example of a film peaking too soon. At its core, it's a standard horror film about pretty young people who get lost in a foreign land and fall prey to unspeakable evil. The film works, up to a point, due to the matter of fact presentation of said deviousness. Alas, after a stunningly strong first half, the film has nowhere to go and nothing of interest to say, leaving the remaining running time to simply observe unimaginable suffering and seemingly pointless cruelty.

A token amount of plot - Jenny and Lindsey are two young Americans who are road-tripping through Europe. Like all such creatures, they end up with a flat tire in the middle of the night, in a part of Germany with no cell reception and no plausible avenues for rescue. Instead of simply staying in the car until daylight, they choose to trek a short distance and take refuge with an odd but helpful doctor who claims to specialize in separating Siamese twins. No sooner do they let their guard down do they find themselves strapped to gurneys in the doctor's basement, held captive alongside another apparent hostage. Needless to say, they really should have just waited in the car.

That's all the plot you need, so that's all you get. It goes without saying that the evil Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) intends to perform some unnecessary surgery on his unwilling patients. In a move that resembles a similar suspense-building gambit in James Cameron's Titanic, Dr. Heiter explains in specific detail, complete with quaint visual aids, exactly what he plans to do with his victims long before the operation is scheduled. It's a sickening reveal that is brutally effective in creating unbearable tension as we await a seemingly inevitable date with a ghastly procedure. But once the much-anticipated event arrives, the film has nowhere left to go. Thus, after a powerful and frightening initial 45-minutes, the final 45-minutes can only linger on the aftermath of said horror, objectively and clinically detailed pain and misery for no real purpose beyond apparent shock value.

While the film smartly holds its gore in reserve, giving you only enough gruesome imagery to dread the gruesome moment, the fact remains that the picture has no real purpose beyond being 'shocking'. None of the characters, be they victim or villain, are the least bit developed. And the experiment in question produces such an appalling result that we basically sit there, sympathetically looking away as the patients endure several stomach-churning effects of the experiment, just hoping that the victims' suffering is almost over one way or another. I wasn't so much offended by the content as I was annoyed at the lack of any context or deeper meaning beneath the human misery on display. And said absence of any real purpose or even a forward narrative drive in turn bored me for much of the second half.

The first acts of the picture show a great deal of promise. The main location is creepy and clinical and Laser does much with little as the ice-cold and often off-the-cuff insane doctor. The slow build to the 'money scene' is genuinely dread-inducing and the film plays fair in terms of logic and character. But once the wait is over and the deed is done, you realize that you only have to look forward to watching innocent people suffering for no particular reason. At heart, The Human Centipede is a roller coaster where there is only one long, unending drop. The ride up the hill is nerve-wracking and skittish, but the plunge downward quickly becomes nothing more than stomach-churning and pointlessly unpleasant. Frankly, if you're going to revel in such debasement and agony, you really ought to at least try to have a moral or even a reason. Otherwise, I'm just watching a snuff film, and a relatively boring one at that.

Grade: C