Thinking About The Human Centipede
By Paul Barker
This Friday night I watched Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence) on my laptop as the sun was setting in the background. It was almost the best movie I’ve seen this year, falling second only to Tom Cruise’s Knight and Day. Six’s The Human Centipede is about a wealthy German psycho and his desire to stitch three human beings together, to create a human centipede. When the German-psycho-surgeon is asked if he has a wife he responds slowly, painfully, automatically, clearly: “No. I.. don’t… like…. human..beings.” Which sums him (and the movie) up pretty well, as does this photo of our post-Nazi psycho anti-hero running around his backyard with his human centipede:
In any case, what Roger Ebert said about the film begins to explain why I like it so much. He writes, “I am required to award stars to the movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” I like that. I like that which can’t be understood, which can’t be gauged by our typical ways of gauging and that is certainly my first reaction to The Human Centipede. When it began I was thinking aye this is a David Lynch film? Five minutes later, I was thinking eh, this is a porno flick? Eight minutes later, I was thinking ah this is just your typical horror movie? For the rest of the movie I was just thinking, What?
So I praise it, so I think it is important –– for the same reason many a people think original cable television shows, Lady Gaga, and Sahea Grey are so amazing. It just feels refreshingly different from what has come before it, albeit it the last horror film I saw was I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). Which is pretty much my point precisely.