Review - The Human Centipede 2

Tom Six’s self referential sequel to his much loved and equally reviled The Human Centipede is funny enough called The Human Centipede 2.

The Human Centipede 2 is a vile beast, you will hate yourself for watching it and even more so because it is just so damn watchable.

The plot is that Martin (Laurence Harvey) a mentally disturbed, fat, asthmatic man is obsessed by the first film and goes about creating his own centipede – with 12 people.

Mercifully shot in black and white, the film spends much of its time in the setup before the actual centipede creating begins. It shows Martin’s life, his dead end job, his awful mother and the absolute bleakness that the rest of his life will hold. The childhood terrors also haunt him at night, a rather unpleasant statement that makes it quite clear that Martin was raped by his father when he was younger.

The film kicks into all its gory glory when the centipede starts taking shape, a horrific sequence that runs for about the last fifteen or so minutes of the film. I won’t go through all the litany of horrors that abound but suffice to say that the effects are quite good and the sounds effects are even better, if you don’t see something happening on screen, you’ll certainly hear it in all in squelchy goodness.

Whilst the film is extreme in nature (whilst not being the most horrendous thing ever to hit screens as some would have you believe) that doesn’t mean it is badly made. Tom Six does have a great deal of skill as a director (less so as a writer) and it is all on display here as he frames all the shots very well and really gives the film, the grimy, filthy look it so deserves.

The other part of the film is the acting – everyone in this is very brave. None more so than Laurence Harvey who plays the complex Martin. For what is essentially a non-speaking role, Harvey conveys all the emotions (rightly or wrongly) that you’d expect from a character of this kind, it is a testament to his acting that the film didn’t descend into farce, which it could have done so easily with the over the top subject matter.

Tom Six promises a 3^rd   and final film in this series, that will start where this one left off, Six seems to be wanting to stitch his audiences’ mouths to their own buttholes by looping the series back around on itself, perhaps that is joke and Six is the prankster, if this is the case I guess we will see the punch line in the 3^rd film. In the time between now and when it is released everyone can prepare themselves for an assault on good taste and their own personal boundaries.