Dr Heiter (Dieter Laser) is sitting in his car in a quiet layby, gazing longingly at a photograph of the pet dogs he sadly lost recently, although it was what he did with his pooches that was responsible for their deaths. When a truck driver stops nearby and gets out to relieve himself, the mad doctor sees his chance and takes his tranquiliser rifle and shoots the man, dragging him into his car to take back for experimentation. Not so far away are two American tourists, Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie), planning their night out - but they take a wrong turn on the journey...
When cheery, cowboy hat-sporting Dutchman Tom Six announced that his latest movie was going to be a new kind of horror tribute to all those shockers he was such a big fan of, the internet meme he unleashed was one of the most popular of 2010. That was down to the premise for The Human Centipede being so disgusting that it captured the imagination of all those who heard it, though not necessarily in a good way. Some vowed never to watch the film and were keen to prevent others from watching it as well, while the more liberally-minded, or more attuned to the black comedy inherent in the film, were keen to seek it out.
The reaction among those who saw it was similarly divided between those who enjoyed the novelty of the idea and those who dismissed it as trash, with one idea in its head and little else to offer aside from revolting the audience. Yet although this could have been any tawdry, shot on video shockfest, actually it was not quite as bad as the critics would have you believe - you simply had to, as the director did, keep your sense of humour about you at all times. Granted, many find their sense of humour did not extend to such scatalogical chills, but this was by no means a poorly made movie, which in some views only made it worse.
But oddly, Six stuck a note of pathos for him in that the implication seems to be he wishes to replace his beloved dogs, so couple that with his history as a surgeon who separated conjoined twins and you have a crazed pet lover whose misplaced sense of progress creates the Human Centipede of the titile. Trouble is, for those watching this at any rate, Six really only had that one killer notion to entertain, and once the operation had gone ahead there wasn't much else to say: you got what you had heard about, and all that was left was for it to go pear-shaped for everyone involved. True, this went to a place that no other horror movie had gone before, but there was something very Naked Lunch about its concept of stitching people together mouth to anus (Japanese actor Akihiro Kitamura is the head section), and Six retained a "Can you believe we're doing this?" tone throughout. It was made for shock effect, so it's not too much of a bolt from the blue that laughter was probably the best reaction, after all, it was a ludicrous story; it did have the courage of its stupid convictions, no bad thing in horror. Music by Patrick Savage and Holeg Spies.
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