The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence

Review

Tom Six’s sequel to his gutbucket sensation The Human Centipede (First Sequence) is called The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) and features a protagonist who watches the first Human Centipede over and over on video. Watches and studies. The mute, homuncular, pop-eyed, simpleminded, morbidly obese Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) dreams not only of duplicating the ghastly experiment of that film’s Dr. Heiter but quadrupling the number of subjects. Instead of surgically joining three people from mouth to anus (teeth knocked out, knee ligaments severed, digestive tubes fused so that feces travel through each patient in turn), he will connect a dozen—one an actress from First Sequence, lured to London on the pretense of auditioning for Quentin Tarantino, the others more or less random, chosen from his perch before a bank of parking-garage surveillance cameras. Unlike Heiter, Martin has no medical training and instead of sterile instruments uses crowbars, scissors, and rusty knives. He smiles and waves his arms like a conductor as twelve mutilated human beings howl, bleed, lavishly soil one another and themselves, and expire.

The movie is a reductio ad absurdum, a sick joke taken to extremes, beginning with a goof on the notion that horror movies inspire copycats and ending with a test to determine whether some people will watch anything. I didn’t watch most of the last half-hour, preferring to let my eyes rest on the cringing faces of others in the room—although that is a voyeuristic act, too, and possibly more perverse than looking at the carnage onscreen. I got all moralistic about First Sequence, but it doesn’t seem worth taking the bait again. In The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), Six effectively asks what we talk about when we talk about horror, and answers with a resounding rectal explosion. — David Edelstein

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• David Edelstein's Full Review (10/10/11)