I told my coworker about my plan to see a movie called “The Human Centipede“. The response was, “Is that something like Spider-Man, but with a centipede?”, and I responded with, “Yes, but with a super power of eating the poop out of a butt you are surgically attached to, after that butt had already eaten the poop out of another butt, that it was also surgically attached to.” So yes, basically the same exact thing. And I know you are thinking this is an immature way to describe a film of this magnitude, and you’re right, but it’s fun to say poop and butt a lot. If there was a more sophisticated way of explaining what goes on in this movie using actual medical terms, I would, but considering Wolfgang reads this, he brings the average IQ of my readers down quite a few percentage points.

These women should consider themselves lucky that all they got was mouth-to-butt sewing action if they thought they could wander around Germany wearing those outfits.

Our film opens with a psycho German looking at pictures of what appear to be dogs sniffing each others’ butts. Upon further inspection…yes, the dogs are sewn to each others’ butts through their snouts. We meet two American girls, who seem like idiots, trying to get directions to a club. They never find the club, and instead get a flat tire and decide to wander around the woods. Their future turns bleak when we see them walk past a grave marker with the words “To My Beloved 3-Hound” on it, and clearly they are in trouble when the only house they find belongs to mister crazy German. After drugging and restraining them, he tells the two women, and one man who he holds captive, what is in store for them. Yup, you guessed it, butt-sewing and knee-cap cutting. There is a brief, and unsuccessful, escape attempt, and then the human centipede has been constructed.

That shit in the background? Yeah, that let’s you know just how complicated this surgery will be…for an eight year old.

The German doctor starts trying to train his centipede made of humans, or “Human Centipede” if you will, to fetch the paper and tries to teach it to walk, but surprisingly, the participants aren’t really interested. Then comes the scene that everyone fears…the scene where the first guy has to poop, and the girl in the middle has to eat the poop. This was probably the part that made me most queasy, thinking about how she had no choice but to have poop in her mouth, and she couldn’t spit it out, but didn’t want to swallow, and probably threw up in her own mouth, and, well, you get the idea. After a few physical exams by the nice doctor, we learn that the middle woman is constipated and that the girl on the end of the centipede isn’t reacting well to the whole process and is dying. This is when the cops start investigating the disappearance of the girls, which causes them to show up at the doctor’s house. This line of questionings leads to the climax of the film, which I won’t spoil.

I heard that to prepare for their roles, these women sniffed butts for two months prior to filming.

The idea of this movie is fucked up. You know how fucked up the premise is going into the movie, but still somehow prepare yourself for it to be even more fucked up than what you already knew. Surprisingly, it is exactly as fucked up as you imagined, so you aren’t really surprised by anything that happens on-screen. A lot of movies that have a reputation for grossing people out gain their notoriety because of viewers who don’t understand how much gore they should expect based on their trailers alone. A big difference between this film and other notable gross-outs is that the plot alone tips the viewers off to what’s in store for them, so the actual amount of bodily fluids exchanged in the film almost comes as a lackluster disappointment. I said almost a disappointment, but not quite. Once you come to grips with what the movie is about and see the centipede constructed, it’s really not that horrific. You find out that the surgeon was a top surgeon when it came to conjoined twins, which he thought were beautiful, and wanted to see if he could create one, which he did. I went to see this at a midnight showing, so obviously everyone there was looking for the spectacle of it all, and I assume a good amount of people were drunk. This resulted in lots of laughing, and in retrospect, I wonder if it was deserved laughter. Dieter Laser, who played the surgeon, was terrifying. He was like Lance Henriksen, but scarier and more German. He was so over-the-top, you almost didn’t want him to leave, despite the fact that he regularly whipped his centipede. Most of his dialogue and acting was so insane, it caused laughter, so it’s hard to tell whether this movie was purposely over-the-top, or if it’s hard not to laugh at the absurdity of it. There were definitely a few scenes where it was clearly supposed to be so bad that it was laughable, but I really can’t remember if the whole movie was supposed to be that way.

Adults wearing diapers? Check. Bloody knee pads? Check. Looks like a regular Saturday night at the old Wolfman residence! Okay just kidding…I meant a regular Tuesday night.

I’m actually kind of interested in the science behind it. All this guy did was cut some ligaments in the knee so that apparently these people couldn’t physically stand up, and had teeth removed and a few stitches were strategically attaching buttholes to mouths, and then boom, human centipede. It kept making me wonder why the subjects didn’t just start shaking their heads around like a dog with a stuffed toy, in hopes of dislodging or ripping all of the stitches? Does this doctor understand the way the digestive system works, and the fact that there wouldn’t be enough nutrients in the first guy’s poop to keep the middle lady alive, let alone the third lady? Rampaige and I also discussed the specifics, such as whether of not the doctor used butthole skin to create a tube through which the poop traveled through directly to the esophagus (her idea), or if there was no tube and the middle lady had to actively put in the effort to chew on and swallow the poop, rather than use her tongue to push it out of the seams like a shitty Play Doh factory (my idea)? And yes, I did purposely say it was a shitty Play Doh factory. If it seems that this review raised more questions about The Human Centipede than answered, go see it for yourself and let me know what answers you have for me…after you finish throwing up, that is.

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