Writer/Director: Tom Six
Rated: n/a (extreme violence, language)
Cast: Laurence R. Harvey, Ashlynn Yennie and Maddi Black
IMDb/trailer | Official movie site

The Human Centipede 2 Full Sequence

I will start by saying I enjoyed much about Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (First Sequence). I thought it was well made, and its sadistic surgeon Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) as the villain was creepy as hell. I can’t say much good about the garbage that is THCII however.

When I read the first synopsis on IMDb when looking into the sequel of the 2009 gross-out thriller, I thought there must have been a rogue contributor on the page. It mentioned of the lead masturbating with sandpaper while watching the first Human Centipede film. Surely this was a joke, right? Wrong. The story follows a portly, presumably mentally challenged parking garage attendant named Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) who has an extreme obsession with the film. While some movies are able to pull off the sequel that acknowledges its predecessor as a mere film (such as Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows), for some reason I just can’t take it seriously here.

Martin’s obsession with the first film leads him to do everything imaginable to create an arthropod of his own (a 12 person centipede!). Martin is the exact opposite of Dr. Heiter, with no medical skills or equipment whatsoever. His methods of capturing his subjects, let alone how he performs his operations, are painful to watch whereas I found the uneasiness of the first film originated mostly from the psychological aspect.

It is my contention that Tom Six made this film as a sick joke. Upon hearing the mainstream response about the first film as being “the most disturbing film ever made,” I can imagine his reply being something along the lines of “Oh you want disturbing? I’ll give you disturbing.” He was certainly successful in making a gruesome film, but in the process sullied the effectiveness of his first film. I think there may also have been an attempt at some kind of allegory in there about the influence of media on those who commit acts of violence, but any evidence of that was outdone by the film’s need to make its audience sick.