In the seemingly endless list of horror subgenres, I plant my flag in the body horror camp.  Nothing, to me, is  as terrifying as desecration of the flesh or its transformation into something non-human, unrecognizable and downright icky.  Because of this peculiar bent, I worship at the altar of David Cronenberg, who has managed to make films in this vein, while still finding a meaning amidst the pustules and misshapen protagonists.  It is for that reason that I paid particular attention to the release of The Human Centipede, a film that promised, with its trailer, just the sort of body horror I enjoy.  Sadly, Centipede is less the harbinger of a new era in body horror and more mad scientist B-movie with a fiendish plot device in its pocket.

Writer/director Tom Six brings us evil in the form of Dr. Heiter, played with extra creepiness by Dieter Laser (and who wouldn't want that last name?), a surgeon specializing in the separation of conjoined twins.  Tired of rending apart the mistakes of nature, Heiter fixes on the idea of creating one entity from several, resulting in glimpses of his three-hound in photographs.  When the hound experiment goes reasonably well, Heiter is determined to bring this experiment to life using human beings.

Enter friends Lindsay and Jenny (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie), Americans vacationing abroad when they have - you guessed it - a flat tire near the isolated home of Herr Heiter.  Once inside his home under the pretense of aid, Heiter drugs them and secures them to hospital beds in his basement lab.  Accompanied by another lost lamb and unfortunate guinea pig, Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), Heiter explains to his subjects his plan - to create the titular human centipede by grafting the three together, mouth to anus.  As the trailer for the film reveals, Heiter gets his wish.

when they have - you guessed it - a flat tire near the isolated home of Herr Heiter.  Once inside his home under the pretense of aid, Heiter drugs them and secures them to hospital beds in his basement lab.  Accompanied by another lost lamb and unfortunate guinea pig, Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), Heiter explains to his subjects his plan - to create the titular human centipede by grafting the three together, mouth to anus.  As the trailer for the film reveals, Heiter gets his wish.

There is an inherent shock factor in the very premise of this film, and those among you who have made up your minds to never see this film based on that alone, your limits have been noted and appreciated.  For those who are curious, or even excited at the idea of something so outrageous, hold your conjoined horses a moment.  Once the centipede is out of the bag in the film, so is much of the movie's momentum lost.  The gimmick of the movie is delivered, and if that's all you wanted out of this exercise in horror, you'll be plenty satisfied.  But a gimmick is not a movie.  At least, not a very good one.

The outlandish concept is shocking, but once you've gotten over the shock of that, and most aware of the film have come to terms with the premise, if nothing else, then Tom Six is charged with taking that conceit somewhere.  There are some musings about Heiter's God complex and the usual game of chase between villain and victims, but this is a surprisingly by-the-numbers affair.  Sure, the depravity's turned to eleven in theory, but the movie itself is not terribly bloody or gory, though still unsettling at times.  The characters are flat, with little explanation given for Heiter's descent into madness, and the test subjects in question are frustratingly two-dimensional.  

But a gimmick is not a movie.  At least, not a very good one.

The outlandish concept is shocking, but once you've gotten over the shock of that, and most aware of the film have come to terms with the premise, if nothing else, then Tom Six is charged with taking that conceit somewhere.  There are some musings about Heiter's God complex and the usual game of chase between villain and victims, but this is a surprisingly by-the-numbers affair.  Sure, the depravity's turned to eleven in theory, but the movie itself is not terribly bloody or gory, though still unsettling at times.  The characters are flat, with little explanation given for Heiter's descent into madness, and the test subjects in question are frustratingly two-dimensional.  

Where Cronenberg tackled such diverse ideas as the effect of pharmacology on humanity (Scanners) or the frightening liberation of sexuality in the 1970s (Shivers), Six paints with much broader strokes and, as such, produces a rather generic bit of horror filmmaking, notable only for its premise.  As much as it pains me to say, the biggest shock in The Human Centipede is how bland a film resulted from such a disturbing idea.