So much fail.
In case you were unaware, there is an upcoming sequel to Human Centipede that has been made and is due out shortly. There is much hullaballoo surrounding this film and it has been banned in England (and I’m sure other nations will follow suit). As a self-proclaimed local horror expert, I thought I’d weigh in on the topic.
DON’T THINK ABOUT FRUIT.
What are you thinking about?
So, first things first, the censorship. Throughout my life I have been inundated with censorship. I grew up in a Southern Baptist home and my parents got me all kinds of books on the evils of Rock n Roll. One book in particular (whose title has escaped me) went band by band, alphabetically, telling the reader what was “wrong” with each lyric in each song on each album. Do you know what this did? My parents wanted it to scare me straight, but instead it encouraged me to find these bands and listen to them. This isn’t an academic paper, so I won’t be citing things, but I would bet everything I own that Tipper Gore and Crew’s Censorship Crusade in the 80s only drove record sales up.
Movies are no different. If you go to any store that sells movies made in the 80s, you will likely find boxes proclaiming their contents were banned in ‘x’ number of countries. They do this because they understand that scandal sells. And I am just as susceptible to this as anyone else. I bought Human Centipede, AntiChrist, Blood Sucking Freaks, Cannibal Holocaust, and countless others because of the controversy surrounding them. We want scandal. We want to see what we aren’t supposed to. Adam and Eve ate the fruit and royally screwed all of humanity for crying out loud.
I don’t think art should be censored or banned, and doing so really just stirs even more interest. That being said, someone kick Tom Six in the nuts.
What made the first Human Centipede so fantastic was that it allowed your imagination to wander. It showed very little, and by doing so, the depravity and hopelessness the characters experienced was multiplied to the viewer based on how sick their own imaginations were. It took the less-is-more framework and ran with it. Tom Six has said that he is showing the audience everything he didn’t show in the first movie. My question is: Why? It’s a classic error in the world of horror. Showing too much (and too soon) is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is the limitations of special effects and “bad” things looking laughable. On top of that, by showing us exactly what’s happening, there is no room for our brains to go to our own dark places and add whatever terror we could otherwise add to the story.
By giving, Tom Six is actually stealing.
True as all of this is, I will still buy the movie, still watch the movie, and still review it. But it will likely be done with a slight tinge of sadness, remembering how great the first movie was. Awful in all of the right ways.
