I get so frustrated when a new film comes around that purposely sets out to disgust people that claim to be horror films. Lets look at some of the culprits of the last few years or so. First we have Hostel, that mildly interesting idea given to us by Eli Roth, now I do have to say that I actually quite like the first Hostel film, it had that weird mix of Euro horror spliced with the extreme side of Japanese cinema with a dollop of American Pie thrown in, it was for the most part an entertaining film and yes I would class it as a horror film, however, it's sequel, the aptly named Hostel 2 is a different kettle of fish. Hostel 2 is a film that seems to pride it's self in it's depiction of violence towards women and even includes a rather distasteful and prolonged scene of torture in which a helpless female is strung up side down and is slashed causing her to slowly bleed out so another woman can bathe in her blood. Now I can tell some people might read this and think hey, that's sounds cool and who am I to stop people from viewing things, but I found it very difficult to watch and since Hostel 2 we seemed to been thrown this heavy bag of supposed horror in which the film has scene after scene of horrific violence towards women. Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is an incredibly brutal film to sit through due to some of the scenes of torture, it's not a nice film and I suppose it wasn't made to cater to all tastes but again the violence towards women is evident and very difficult to stomach. Not only that film but films such as the Saw franchise of which we have seven of them, all seem to be made just to show as much torture or gore as the budget allows. Now again I have to admit I do like the first Saw film, it's a cleverly written thriller with an absolute punch in the gonads twist. But when you recycle the same plot line in every film it starts to wear you down, you loose interest and the gore and violence stop being horrific and becomes the norm. You find your self desensitized to screen violence and this leads me on to the film I am reviewing here today. Director Tom Six leaped into notoriety last year with the release of Human Centipede, a film a lot of people were calling sick and depraved, but also finding a huge cult following. I can tell you though, this reviewer found it boring and surprisingly comical which I guess is the sort of dark humour Mr. Six was going for. I've even heard people say it's the sickest film ever, these people have clearly never seen Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox or Ruggiero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, The later of which, is a fantastic film and a certain late 90s lost in the woods video camera horror film owes a lot too. Compared to those films HC1 is a relatively tame film. Released the same year as the slightly more controversial A Serbian Film, a film that required nearly five minutes of cuts to get an 18 certificate in the U.K, HC1 was passed completely uncut by the BBFC. Fast forward a year and take a right turning at the month of June 2011. Human Centipede 2 is outright banned in the UK, a scenario which echos the previous years controversy over A Serbian Film and much like that film, it was resubmitted after an appeal from Bounty films and is passed with an 18 certificate but with 32 compulsory cuts totalling just over 2 and a half minutes, still less than ASF but still heavily cut. But thanks to the original decision from the BBFC, it acted as the best form of promotion, this then got people talking, then scene spoilers and such and even though I pretty much hated the first film, I still got caught up in the storm of it, although this was mostly due to the constant conversations between my self and Tim Porter ( see Bedevilled review) and how we both stated we had no interest. But being the geek that I am I decided to give it a look. Boy do I wish i'd watched something else now.
Here's the basic plot for HC2.
Martin is a middle aged man who still lives at home with his suicidal mother, he has deep disturbing issues from his past which he has to deal with also. Martin never speaks, he has a constant vacant stare in his eyes. He works at an all night car park as a security guard. Martin becomes obsessed with the first HC film, which in this is just that, a film, so strangely this is not a sequel but a skewed version of time. Anyway Martin is so obsessed with HC1 to a point where he decides to create his own human centipede, the full sequence, a 12 person centipede and he does this by attacking punters at the car park and taking them to a warehouse he is leasing, but his centipede won't be complete without it's head, that being the star of the original film, Ashlyne Yennie, playing a fictional version of herself here. Things at home go from bad to worse and Martin flips his lid and ends up killing his mother in a grizzly fashion. After this martin throws himself into the creation of his centipede and for the next 35 minutes or so we are given an almost dialogue free finale of the film in which his 12 person centipede is made to do things.
It sounds interesting doesn't it?....well it ain’t, its boring, repetitive, badly acted, scripted, edited and directed. It looks like a film made by a couple of amateur film makers who managed to get their hands on a decent camera. There is no development into the character of Martin, no back story of such and very little in the way of what happened to him in the past apart from a few off screen whispers about his dad getting a chub on when he was crying as a child. There is almost no insight into the mind of this character, what makes him do these things and why. We are told that Martin was abused by his father and this may be the reason but it's never fully developed. This could have been a film that was on the level of Henry: Portrait of a Serial killer, a look into the mind of psychopath but it's not, it would have been a far more interesting film had Tom Six decided to look deeper into the mind of Martin and I may have had a bit more respect for the film. I will however say one good thing about this film, that thing is Lawrence R.Harvey, The actor playing Martin who does do a brilliant performance as the DIY surgeon. Harvey never says a word through out the entire film apart from a few evil laughs and cackles but it's all in the movement, the blank expression and absolute evil that Harvey manages to bring to a very poor film and this elevates the film above a 0 star review.
Tom Six, dunno if that's his real name but if it is then fair do's It a pretty cool name to attach to a film, it's instantly recognizable with the sort of out put you would expect much like Dario Argento and his Giallo movies or George A. Romero and his zombie films, but unlike those two icons of modern horror, Six can't write worth a damn. One major plot hole or just a complete fuck up on Six's part is a conversation between Yennie and Martin, although all one sided, about her being in the U.K to audition for a new Quentin Tarantino film, I don't know about you but what kind of agency would send their client over to the U.K without reading a script or hearing any internet gossip or any new is magazines like Variety or even on E!, and why didn't they check with QT's production company? It baffles me that a film like this would even name drop someone like Tarantino and not even have researched the Hollywood system, maybe it's just me nit picking but this angered me.
But when the film does finally get to the end and you have the 'shit' sequence, you realise that what the film actually is, is a long, boring, drawn out 60 minutes of repetitive killing with a 30 minute fart joke punchline, it literally is just that. I don't know but it might be Tom Six's sense of humour, maybe he's saying that this film is indeed a piece of shit. I saw it more as Six taking a massive shit on horror cinema, because folks that's all this film is, a steaming pile of shit. Too harsh maybe?. Nah fuck it, I hated this film, I hated the first and I can guarantee I will probably hate everything else Tom Six makes. Avoid this film like the plague and go watch John Carpenter's The Thing, now that is a real horror film...oh go on, you won't regret it.....
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| 1 Star mainly for Lawrence R Harvey |
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