2.
The second film of the trilogy, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), hit limited release and VOD in 2011. By this time it seemed the world had cooled on The Human Centipede. The boom had happened, and it had accumulated in a “South Park” spoof. Generally once those guys go after something, it is all downhill from there as far as cultural relevance. Even I was starting to grow out of the devastation phase, and figured the sequel would just be the same thing with new characters. I felt I had truly pushed it as far as I could outside of an actual snuff film, and while I would keep my eyes peeled for something that could be considered a devastator, I had pretty much stopped seeking them out.
I liked Insidious, and had accepted that was as far as I really needed to go anymore regarding horror. Nonetheless, Tom Six announced he was doing a Centipede sequel, and I was going to check it out based on a feeling of obligation, and admitted curiosity. Much less enthused than the first time around, my roommate and I turned the film on. It was the first thing we watched on our 50 inch TV; figuring we would break it in right.
After the film was over there was nothing but natural silence in the room. I remember when my mother described walking out of her first screening of The Exorcist, noting she was among a silent audience. I had tried to replicate this experience falsely in the past, but Centipede 2 was the first time it happened naturally. It was like getting hit with a ton of bricks. In an interview with Indiewire, Six states, “[P]art one was all psychological. Then in the second one, I could show everything. I wanted the shit, the gore, the dirt. It was a pretty easy step to make.”
Boy did he make it, and in doing so pulled off a narrative move that solidifies the saga as, for better or for worse, the vision of an auteur. As about half the audience bailed on the trilogy after the first film, many do not know the structure Six took in the sequels.
Full Sequence is set in a meta world in which the first exists and has been released on home video. Instead of again focusing on the victims, Six gives the role of protagonist to Martin (Lawrence Harvey), a man obsessed with First Sequence to a level of insanity. In an arguably fantastic and definitely disgusting character moment, Martin is seen masturbating to the original film while at work. This basically tells you all you need to know about Martin, but to sum it up, he’s not the kind of guy you would invite over for a barbecue.
After he’s done with his stress relief, he heads down to the parking garage and smashes a bystander in the head knocking him out, and drags him to a warehouse with eleven other hostages. You know where this is going; Martin eventually sews them into a twelve person centipede, and that is essentially the movie. So what makes this film so much more devastating than the first?
For one, it fixed a lot of my described issues with First Sequence. Making that film exist in the “real world” allows the genre cliches make much more sense. Six has mentioned he had ideas for all three films upon making the first, and while I have no confirmation of validity of that, I believe it more than I believed the “Lost” writers, or even George Lucas when he talks of his Star Wars prequels.
Six first drops the color. The black and white makes everything look dirty, and the difference between blood and feces hard to perceive, instead just looking like fluids in general. I won’t go into details on the excruciating level of sick this film hits visually, but I will say where the first movie used emotional close-ups to convey the horror, this one uses laxatives as a plot device.
Six is fully aware of his restraint in the previous film, and goes out of his way to “correct” that action here. He dances around you like a boxer, catching you off guard with each jab before delivering his knockout blow. As stated before, I will avoid graphic descriptions, but I feel that in order to give you a full grasp of this trilogy, the climactic moment of this film must at least partially be revealed as it focuses on a pregnant member of the centipede and she begins to go into labor.
I’m sure you can picture that (or perhaps it’s best if you can’t), but believe me Six does not hold back here, showing every little detail. Suffice to say, after a failed escape the woman and her newborn both end up dead. The scene is so horrifying it dwarfed everything I have seen before in cinema, and will hopefully ever see again. This scene broke me, and it broke me late in the film. There is no time to recover, before you know it Martin cuts the throat of everyone on the centipede and walks away; the end. Not only does Six deny the glimmer of hope he provided a few years earlier, but spits in your face for even considering he might provide one here.
After Full Sequence, I was done. My devastation phase had, to my legitimate surprise, left me, for lack of a better word, devastated. My roommate and I lived together for another two years, and to my knowledge he hasn’t watched a horror film since. Since Full Sequence I still love and support the genre, but I watch it as entertainment and it is very hard to feel much of anything in the way of fear or dread. That being said when Tom Six announced his third Human Centipede film, I was met with a curdling in my stomach that had not been present for quite some time.
