As you can tell by the title of this blog, it’s all about the spoilers—and spoiling your dinner. Also, considering the subject matter, there will probably be bad buns puns up the wahzoo.
I avoided The Human Centipede for a decade, but I kept getting a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach; what kind of horror fanatic would I be if I didn’t just bear down and dig deep into the trilogy at least once in my life? And so I’ve finally loosened my sphincter long enough to sit down and take in all of them…in the unrated editions. Since I’m so late to the centipede orgy, I’ll bet there are many who have still refused to ever show up…and yet they kind of want to know what horrors await in the series. Well, I’m here to get it all out in the opening. I promise to go easy on you with the images. There aren’t any really graphic stills from the movies to make you sick. Instead, I’m going to describe every single disgusting scene in each film for you. So let’s get cracking.
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (First Sequence) (2009)
The dread I felt about sitting down to watch this film rivals only the fear I had of watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time back when I was a teen in the 80s. That’s a good thing, because I miss the days when I feared horror as much as I relished it.
I was surprised to discover that The Human Centipede is actually a great horror movie at its core, because as heinous as the concept is, it’s done very…um…tastefully. The late Dieter Laser, who plays the doctor, delivers all the horror with his performance.
The film gets right to it with the most basic, ever-effective formula. Two girls head for a club while on vacation. They get a flat on a deserted road, they go looking for a phone, they find the doctor’s house. He lets them in and doesn’t even try to pretend he’s normal. He’s fucking terrifying. And yet the girls make the stupid move of drinking the water he offers them…
They wake up in his basement lab strapped to hospital beds. Alongside them is another victim, an Asian guy who can’t speak English. Good thing the doctor has a chart on the wall to visually depict exactly what he’s going to do to this trio.
His only explanation for his diabolical plan is that he had a successful career separating Siamese twins and now wants to do the opposite. He goes into explicit detail about how it’s all going to go down, including taking out tendons and ligaments in their knees so they can’t stand up, cutting flaps of skin on their asses and mouths to attach them together, and removing all their front teeth. Not sure why that part is necessary. It’s not like anyone is going to fucking bite down on someone else’s asshole (at least, not in the nonsexual context of the situation they’re in…).
One stubborn girl is not into butt stuff, so she breaks free and bolts, making for a really good chase scene. When the doctor catches her he informs her of her punishment—she gets to be the middle segment of his centipede, so she’ll have to get it from both ends. Damn, he’s evil (again, since this is a nonsexual context).
There’s some icky gore during the operation, but we don’t see anything beyond skin being cut. When the trio awakes, the ass-to-mouth marriages are hidden by bandages for the rest of the movie.
The doctor makes the centipede stand, dances gloriously around it to celebrate his success, and even holds up a hand mirror to show each segment how good they look kissing ass.
The Asian guy is the lucky bastard that scored the head spot, so when the doctor finally drops a bowl of food in front of him, he looks back at the girls, fleetingly realizing what the repercussions will be if he eats. I guess he feels guilty about not feeding them if he starves himself to death, because he chows down!
When the food finally makes its way to the end of his GI tract, the doctor shouts “feed her!’ then gets all in the middle girl’s face and shouts things like, “Swallow it, bitch!” No disgusting fecal matter flies, but we so clearly get the picture, and it’s enough to make us hurl. Hm…if she hurls, is that like a puke enema for the guy?
Next thing we know, the two girls are becoming very sick because, well, you know, they’re eating feces. The doctor squeezes the incision of the middle girl’s mouth and puss oozes out. But before he can figure out a plan to make them better, two detectives start poking around due to reports of missing people in the area…
When it turns out the detectives don’t even stand a chance against the doctor, the centipede has to come up with a plan. The Asian guy loses his shit (not literally), and manages to bite a chunk out of the doctor’s neck. The centipede tries to escape, which requires climbing stairs. This is pretty gnarly. It’s a spiral staircase, and the twists, turns, and gravity put a whole lot of strain on the stitches. The links begin separating and bleeding, the doctor starts crawling after them since he’s hurt so badly, and he fucking licks up the blood as he goes.
So how does it all come out in the end? The poor middle girl gets the ultimate punishment. The detectives, the doctor, and both the front and back of the centipede die, leaving her trapped and attached to two corpses.
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (Full Sequence) (2011)
I’m guessing that because the shocking subject matter of even the director’s cut of the first film felt very rated R, creator Tom Six decided he needed to give an audience sick enough to watch the film what they really craved—more ass and shit. Part 2 is (un)pure assploitation.
This repulsive film is so graphic that Tom Six was forced to release it in black and white. The Blu-ray does include the color version, however, it is the rated version, which is 3 minutes shorter than the black and white cut.
Just like Dieter Laser, star Laurence R. Harvey gives a chilling performance…in a completely different way. He plays a slovenly man with an intellectual disability who lives with his verbally abusive mother and was sexually abused by his father. But most importantly, he has a pet centipede, is obsessed with The Human Centipede movie and one of its main actresses, and wants to make a 12-person centipede of his own. So he rents warehouse space and starts collecting segments.
Harvey doesn’t speak at all and tends to just stare with bug eyes and an emotionless expression, which makes him so creepy. He’s also gross. He jerks off while watching The Human Centipede, and his penis is on full display. When his mother discovers his stash of Human Centipede jerk off material, he gets his centipede to bite her than bashes the fuck out of her skull.
When he finds his predatory doctor getting a blowjob from a whore in a car while saying he’d rather be fucking “the retard” up the ass, he shoots the doc in the balls.
He lures one of the actresses from the first movie to his lair by promising her an audition with Quenton Tarantino. When he picks her up to drive her to the “audition space,” she makes meta jokes about being in the first film.
With all twelve segments writhing on the floor, Harvey gets to work. Instead of anesthesia, he knocks them all out. It wears off fast once he begins bashing out their teeth with a hammer. He cuts open their knees and rips out the tendons and ligaments with his fingers, and finally cuts their butts into flaps then connects them together with a staple gun.
He chooses the main girl as the head of the centipede, but when she refuses to eat he forces a tube down her throat and feeds her. When she screams, he rips out her tongue.
He goes to work massaging everyone’s stomachs so a fart will travel all the way to the tail of the centipede. Then he injects them with a laxative and laughs when they all start foaming at the mouth…with shit. To make things artsy, all the shit splatters are colored brown on the black and white cut of the film.
Think it can’t get worse? Harvey wraps razor wire around his dick and rapes the rear of the centipede in the ass. It’s a good thing the damage done is shown in black and white.
One pregnant girl he didn’t attach to the centipede gets away when she feels her baby coming out. Blood gushes from between her legs as she runs, she gets in a car, the baby pops out onto the floor, and in her haste to drive away she steps on its head.
Meanwhile, one guy inside loses his shit and tears his mouth free from the ass in front of him, so now two shorter centipedes are crawling around the floor.
Harvey comes in and begins shooting each segment in the head. He runs out of bullets so switches over to sawing away at their heads with a knife.
However, the girl from the first movie gets the ultimate revenge. She sticks the feeding tube up his ass and sends his centipede to do a colonoscopy.
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE III (Final Sequence) (2015)
After making it through the second film, I figured the third film would be a piece of ass. I mean…a piece of cake.
Since Tom Six took the ass play as far as he could in the second film, it would just be repetitive to do it again, even if this film does feature a centipede made up of all the men in a prison. Honestly, any still shots you’ve seen of the centipede from this film are about all you really see of it in the entire film. Instead the film focuses on the exploitative torture the prisoners are first subjected to at the hands of the prison’s crazy warden.
Going totally meta, this movie brings back Dieter Laser as the warden and Laurence R. Harvey as his assistant. Laser is absolutely insane. I’d like to scoff and say that in real life no one around him would just sit by and let a lunatic run the show, but, you know…Trump.
The warden is about to lose his job because his prisoners are out of control, no matter how much he tries to torture them into submission. Harvey shows him The Human Centipede, suggesting it would be a brilliant deterrent for anyone thinking of committing a crime while also saving on food costs. The warden doesn’t buy the idea at first. Instead, he relishes torturing everyone he can, starting with finger-fucking his secretary and then smelling his fingers.
He snaps the masturbation arm of one prisoner, uses boiling water to waterboard another, and cuts the testicles out of one’s scrotum then eats them for lunch. He makes his secretary blow him and swallow while his assistant is in the room. He has a nightmare that the prisoners take revenge on him by cutting a hole in the side of his body and fucking it.
Despite all this insanity and gruesome gore, the film is oddly boring. It doesn’t help that Laser’s over-the-top performance is hindered by terrible audio. You can barely understand a thing he’s saying. Not to mention, aside from featuring the longest centipede of the series, this is also the longest film. It isn’t until 55 minutes in that the warden finally agrees to taking the centipede route. He shows the previous films to the inmates so they know what they’re in for. Sticking to meta territory, the film brings back the Asian guy from the first film as one of the inmates, and the warden uses a line on him that the doctor used in the first film.
The prisoners try to revolt, leading to a bunch of violence that lands the secretary in a coma. Sooooo…the doctor goes and fucks her unmoving body.
Then the operation begins. There’s some nasty gore as we see close-ups of mouths and anuses being sewn together.
Finally it’s time to reveal the centipede to the governor—Eric Roberts. I swear, the only thing missing from this film is Danny Trejo as the head of the centipede and Lance Henriksen as the doctor. As the warden shows off the centipede, he notices the anus of the tail segment is dirty and makes his assistant wipe it with a handkerchief, which causes it to fart.
So how to make this final film even more ridiculous? The warden also decided to create something new: a human caterpillar! This smaller insect consists of a handful of prisoners with their arms and legs cut off. If the movie weren’t going for totally absurd at this point, the concept of being connected ass-to-mouth with no ability to move at all would be a definite fucked up elevation of the original concept.
The big kicker is the film taking a jab at the state this nation was about to head a year after its release. Roberts loves the idea, says it’s just what America needs, and believes the plan could land him the presidency.
While I get the exclamation point of this message (complete with “God Bless America” playing over the final scene), I actually prefer the alternate ending included in the bonus material on the Blu-ray (which also includes an explicit deleted scene of Harvey blowing Laser). The alternate ending cuts to the warden waking up to discover the third film was all a dream…and he’s actually the doctor from the first movie, at the beginning of the first movie. Awesome. The ultimate meta moment, it brings the films into an infinite loop and even reflects one of the final points made by the warden; he suggests they could even connect the entire centipede together and make one infinite circle of prisoners that just keep passing their feces through the chain.
I have to admit, as sick and disgusting as it all is, Tom Six did a brilliant job of bringing us three very different films and never holding back in making things even more psychotic than the time before. The Human Centipede truly does shit all over the redundancy of most trilogies out there these days.
