Following the critical tradition that reads the first wave of US splatter movies, like Romero’s Dead films, as a response to Vietnam and the Watts riots, should we see the rise of what has been dubbed ‘torture porn’, with its emphasis on the protracted brutalisation of the human body, as a similar mirror of world events? Do such films present us with an image of a post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib world? Do they offer some form of masochistic catharsis in such times? Are they examples of the ongoing pornific­ation of everything? Of a dialectical response to the calls of relaxed censorship and sensation-hungry audiences? Or, are we just seeing a mutating set of variations on the genre’s primal themes, even if the particular tropes employed might suggest otherwise to the shocked casual viewer.

The Human Centipede might conceivably bear out any of these ideas, though I’d tend towards the last of them. Despite the considerable Internet-spread hype surrounding this supposed ne plus ultra in sickbag-filling visceral ghastliness, it merely dresses up some of the hoariest of genre clichés in its cynical emperor’s new clothes: Attractive airhead girls lost in the woods? Check. Frothing-mad German scientist? Check. Incredibly stupid policemen? Check. And so on, for over 90 lacklustre minutes. It’s the same old story: dim-witted tourists end up abducted, imprisoned and tortured by some wacko. Writer/director Tom Six’s ace-in-the-hole, though, is the central idea that this particular wacko is a crazed surgeon with a desire to create a ‘human centipede’ by sewing his three terrified victims together in a mouth-to-anus daisy-chain.

Trouble is, this single – admitt­edly rather arresting – image is all that Six has to offer. And once you’ve imagined it, there’s no reason to see the film. There are no characters, no plot (other than the baldest of abduction/attempted escape scenarios), and, crucially, no motivation for anything that happens. Dieter Laser’s mad doctor is no Franken­stein determined to wrest scient­ific fire from the gods; he just sews people together because… well, because that’s what he does. Or perhaps because that’s what Germans do. In the solitary line of dialogue that in any way hints at the Herr Doktor’s reasons, Laser tells us: “I don’t like human beings.” Me neither, much of the time, but I haven’t sewn my bank manager’s mouth to my ex-girlfriend’s bottom, have I? The doctor does appear to like dogs though, fondling old photos of his previous experiment, a drei-hund affair, naturally. A telling detail? Hitler, while no friend to his fellow man, was very fond of his Blondi, wasn’t he? So, there we are, then – it all makes sense, doesn’t it?

At least, perhaps, to a Dutchman, which Six is. In fact, according to the film’s PR hand-out, he’s the very Dutchman who “was one of the pioneer directors for the original and highly successful reality TV show Big Brother” and acted as “directing consultant” on that programme’s later international incarnations as it spread, rot-like, across Europe and beyond.

Now, things become considerably clearer: the entire misguided wheeze obviously started off as one of those Big Brother household ‘tasks’ that never made it to our screens; Jade Goody, Chantelle and the annoying bloke with Tourettes were to share one gastro-intestinal tract for a week in order to win alcohol for their fellow housemates. Oh, what larks!

Such a high-concept hook might be enough to sustain the voyeuristic psycho-dramas of a game-show, but a 90-minute feature cries out for more, and more than its hopeless director can deliver – things like tension and terror, which the film’s cack-handed construction simply doesn’t allow for. Take the operation scene, which surely should have been the film’s gut-wrenching centrepiece: it’s hopelessly rushed, while instead we get endless sequences of our now six-legged composite hero/heroine attempting to make an unlikely getaway. I just couldn’t help thinking of the chain gang sequence in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run.

Poorly constructed and utterly lacking in any sense of what its central conceit might actually mean, the film collapses in on itself, as malnourished as the centipede’s rear end. The sequel is already in production; get ready to eat more shit.