Is it possible to make a dangerous film? The British
Board of Film Classification seemed to think so earlier this year, taking the
unusual step of refusing director Tom Six’s follow-up to his notorious The Human Centipede a certificate on the grounds that
it posed “a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be
caused to potential viewers”. Then, after a complete U-turn, The Human Centipede 2: Full
Sequence emerged onto British cinema screens, shorn of two minutes 37 seconds; those
dangerous bits, then, included the sight of a man masturbating with sandpaper
(ouch) and wrapping barbed wire around his penis (before raping the woman
unlucky enough to be Tail End Charlie in the centipede; which is apparently OK for us to see).
While I’m touched that the BBFC, unlike the film’s reckless protagonist, has
such concern for our willies and what we might do to (rather than with) them,
I, for one, would rather take my chances with the uncut version. Dafter
viewers, though, would obviously try these things at home.A:
Anyway, it’s obvious that Six had
the BBFC in his sights from the start, setting out to make a movie (with UK
funding) that would press all their buttons; he also, though, seems to have
deliberately pre-empted their own silly argument: THC2 begins with a downtrodden
underground garage attendant called Martin (Laurence R Harvey) – a pop-eyed,
overweight, mentally challenged, asthmatic sort-of-midget; so, your typical
horror film fanboy, then – becoming aroused by watching a DVD of THC1 on a laptop in his office. To
demonstrate the BBFC notion of cause and effect at work, his next act is to
whack an innocent couple with a crowbar as they try to retrieve their car. He
wants, you see, to emulate the crazed Dr Heiter of the film by making his own
human centipede, but three times as long – yes, that’s an impressive 12
victims, joined bottom-to-mouth!
Where the first film was a
conventional enough horror flick constructed from the victims’ point of view, THC2 has no interest in its suffering
ciphers (“All actors are centipedes,” as Hitch might have said), and sticks to
the perspective of the tormentor. The next 50 minutes follow Martin’s efforts
to assemble his materials; ludicrously, for a retarded loser who can’t speak,
he manages to lure one of the first film’s ‘stars’ to England by promising her
a part in a Tarantino movie; just one of the silly plot contrivances that
scupper any sense of reality. This is intercut with faux-kitchen-sink scenes of
Martin’s home life with his ghastly old mum. It’s made clear that he was
fiddled with as a child by his father, thus introducing some kind of centipede
metaphor for the cycle of abuse.
The rest of the film details his
efforts to create his masterpiece. And if you’d been wondering how this
grunting idiot was going to replicate the efforts of a trained surgeon, well,
that’s where the ‘fun’ begins as we watch him toiling gamely away with staple
gun and duct tape to realise his DIY dream. To be honest, it’s a blackly
amusing conceit, but the ensuing torrent of blood and shit will leave few
laughing. Instead, it will undoubtedly shock people, as Six so desperately
wants it to, and the film’s infantile nature becomes increasingly clear,
culminating in a scene where a gleeful, gurgling Martin induces a sort of ‘Mexican
fart’ through the length of his human centipede. At this point, the figure of
Martin seemed to me to change from an image of the film’s imagined viewer to
one of its actual director. Despite its faux-arty black and white photography
and nihilistic posturings, The
Human Centipede 2 is ultimately nothing more than a gigantic, noxious fart in the faces of
censors and audience alike.
While this a
dull and dispiriting film, it earns an extra point for the immortal line: “There’s
a midget having a wank in there!"
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