You know that a film’s viral marketing is working when worries about its content making you feel sick make you avoid watching it! I first had the opportunity to see ‘The Human Centipede’ a year ago when it played at Frightfest, but it was just one too many horror films for me to watch in a short period and I seem to remember that it was showing early in the morning too. I offered my free ticket to a friend who also chickened out from seeing it, so between us, I guess we found a taboo that was (temporarily) too horrible to stomach.

In his review Roger Ebert refused to give ‘The Human Centipede’ any stars (out of five) because he thought the “star rating system is unsuited to this film” – I wouldn’t go that far, but this is certainly a film where the idea that the movie presents overwhelms the viewer so much that it makes the film hard to experience in a traditional way.

Over the last year and a half I’ve seen more newly released films that have disgusted or disturbed me than I’ve seen in a period twice or three times as long over the previous thirty years. This is not to say that there hasn’t been a shortage of disgusting or disturbing films I could have sought out on DVD or in the cinema, rather that I haven’t had the urge to watch say any of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ back catalogue or more recently any of the ‘Saw’ sequels.

The increasing number of films that are being released in UK cinemas which feature incredibly shocking elements seems to have multiplied over the last couple of years which seems to be an unusual trend. I’m not a sociohistorian, so can’t say whether the public’s appetite for extreme entertainment is a result of say ‘the war on terror’ or the recession, in the same way George Romero made ‘Night of the Living Dead’ in response to coverage of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. However, similar to today’s appetite for ‘Gorenography’ it’s hard to say whether the creation of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in mid third republic France was a reaction to the military and political scandals rocking the recently formed constitutional republic.

Perhaps it’s just a generational thing, setbacks in the supposedly increasing civility of humanity; after all it’s only been a couple of hundred years since Tyburn was a popular picnic spot for people who wanted to see a nice hanging while they ate their sandwiches.

Until recently, fans of gore and extreme horror films from around the world would have to get their entertainment from video and DVD rental shops outside of specialist festivals like Frightfest, but the success of ‘Torture porn’ films such as ‘Hostel’ and the ‘Saw’ franchise has shown there’s money to be made in those blood soaked hills, so underground entertainment has become mainstream, influencing the work of art house directors as well as more traditional box office fare.

Admittedly both Michael Winterbottom (in the form of films like ‘9 Songs’) and Lars Von Trier (actually every film he made since ‘Breaking the waves’ in 1996) are no strangers to provocative cinema, but their most recent films ‘The killer inside me’ and ‘Antichrist’ have included scenes so disgusting and visceral, that it’s hard to watch the screen without feeling nauseous. Having seen (and regretted seeing) both those films on the big screen and also having endured ‘2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams’ in order to get an interview with star Bill Moseley – a film billed as a horror comedy, but is neither funny or scary, just gory – it was with some trepidation I finally summoned the courage to watch ‘The Human Centipede’.

I think it’s safe to say that no one going into see the film doesn’t know what it’s about, what with Human Centipede jewellery hitting the streets (!) plus a retro computer game online, so the opening scene is played for laughs as the villain of the piece – Dr. Heiter played by Dieter Laser – lovingly strokes a photo of his favourite pet, a ‘Drei-Hund’ made from three rottweilers stitched together (nicknamed Cerberus, perhaps) in his own inimitable way. He’s busy waiting in a lay-by for people he can shoot with a tranquiliser dart when they nip into the woods for a call of nature. Laser’s performance is a master class in mad scientist overacting, challenging Graham Crowden’s status as top lunatic, veering from intense and creepy to ludicrous eye rolling screeching and this reflects the film as a whole, which ranges from being genuinely unsettling and disturbing to comedic where the laughs are either intentional due to the ludicrous plot or unintentional due to bad acting.

In terms of gore, ‘The Human Centipede’ is relatively tame – a couple of brief shots here and there of scalpels going into flesh and a bit of slimy pus coming out of an inappropriate suture – but even at it its most daft, the concept of the film worms its way into your head and of course sitting in a cinema watching a film about that concept, makes it impossible to escape the idea in your thoughts. At the risk of sounding like a wuss, I actually had a cold sweat at one point watching the film…

As mentioned above, I also had the misfortune of sitting through ‘2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams’ (but could pause the DVD at least) and there’s one shot in particular in that film that goes beyond the limits of bad taste – a rotary saw slicing a conscious woman in half from groin upwards – in this is shown in gruesome close-up. However, as deeply offensive as this is, it’s relatively brief and you can disassociate yourself from having seen it by thinking of how it might have been made (slicing a pig in half perhaps when they cut from a medium shot of the actress to a close-up).

With ‘The Human Centipede’ the idea of stitching three people together along their gastrointestinal tract is just insufferable, but the success of the film suggests it has hit some kind of nerve in the zeitgeist. The only other film I’ve had to endure that included coprophagia / philia was ‘Salò or the 120 Days Of Sodom’ and that is revered as a cult classic.

Luckily I didn’t have to repeat another aspect of watching ‘Salò’ when I saw ‘The Human Centipede’, as I saw the former film at the dear departed Lux centre in Hoxton Square and the air conditioning had broken down on that day, something which had also plagued my previous two visits to the screening room where I saw ‘The Human Centipede’. Watching this film in a sauna would have been too much to take and would have led to me leaving half way through.

At the risk of providing a quote that could be taken out of context for hysterical marketing, in some respects ‘The Human Centipede’ is ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ of the early twenty first century. They both feature unspeakable crimes, both based on some kind of ‘truth’ (the newer film has the ridiculous tagline: “100 percent medically accurate” and the former was based on the crimes of Ed Gein), both show considerably less gore on screen than you might expect, both suffer from bad acting on the part of some of the victims (in each film this at first makes you want them to be captured and tortured)…

The viral interest in ‘The Human Centipede’ also shows that in the short term, at least, it has also become a cult classic in the same way the earlier film has, however I suspect (and hope) its reputation fades as the years go by as while ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ will always be a classic due to the terrific editing, sound design and cinematography, ‘The Human Centipede’ really only has its crazy premise and Laser’s over acting to separate it from other modern gore films.

When the film is at its most effective, director Tom Six handles horror film clichés with aplomb as the centipede and its constituent parts try to escape from various scenarios Dr Heiter has trapped it / them in, and the final scenes where the ‘head’ of the creature bemoans its fate in untranslated Japanese and the final shot of it in the movie – which leaves you wondering if anyone survives – are also actually pretty good.
However without the central concept, this film would have sunk without a trace amongst a sea of undistinguished slasher movies and so it is the plot that justifies the film and one could argue the plot shouldn’t have justified the film being made at all. Also, according to fans of manga by Junji Ito (‘Uzumaki’), it’s not even the director’s original idea.

As a horror film in its own right, I’ve seen much worse (such as ‘2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams’) and so can recommend it for being a reasonably well directed and unsettling movie. As a film that should have been made and that I can recommend to other people, well, I can sympathise with Roger Ebert’s dilemma; suffice to say that ‘The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)’ is being released in 2011, so if nothing else, the box office has certainly given it two thumbs up.