Editor’s Note: Redbox machines are full of terrible B-movies. You know it. I know it. Each week, a brave Daily staffer will take the plunge and watch one of them so you don’t have to.
The final Redbox column of the fall semester falls on my shoulders ... or keyboard. Whatever. Just by reading the film’s title, I picked “The Human Centipede (First Sequence)” to ridicule. Aside from a waste of 90 minutes of my afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect.
Despite the name, this movie isn’t about a mutant with 100 legs, but a mad German doctor, Dr. Heiter, who sews Lindsay and Jenny, two American tourists, to a Japanese guy named Katsuro, mouth-to-posterior, having unsuccessfully tried this before on three dogs.
Cutting off various pieces of their bodies, Heiter succeeds in sewing them together: Katsuro in the front, Lindsay in the middle and Jenny in the rear. Heiter tries to keep them as a pet as much as an experiment, but this does not work incredibly well, as Katsuro fights back at every turn and the girls cry constantly, keeping the doctor awake.
Eventually, two German police officers, Kranz and Voller, track the missing girls to the doctor’s house. After Heiter tries to drug the officers, they go back to the precinct to get a search warrant.
Aside from the physical impossibility and sheer disgust of sewing one person’s lips to another’s rear end, the acting is terrible, particularly from the two American females, whose voices resembled that of dying harpies, at least until their mouths were sewn shut.
It seemed like the best acting was done by the non-English-speaking characters, although I’m not familiar enough with German or Japanese to know if they were effective actors. I’m going to assume they weren’t.
“Centipede” had some decent editing and camera work, but the movie itself is an eyesore. It’s one thing to be a torture film, a la “Saw” (which I’m not a big fan of anyway), or to be just a terrible B-movie, but being both terrible and disgusting takes a great deal of “talent.”
The most disturbing thing about all of this is that the director has already shot a sequel, scheduled to be released in 2011. I’m not interested.
— AJ Lansdale, professional writing senior
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