“The Human Centipede II” Sickens With Artistic Vomit

“The Human Centipede II” opens with the final moments of “The Human Centipede (First Sequence)”, including the closing credits. The camera pulls back, to reveal that this is playing on a laptop computer, and a man in a toll booth in a parking garage is watching the film. Martin Lomax (Laurence R. Harvey) is an asthmatic, overweight, mentally ill, middle-aged, short British man. He lives in a small flat with his emotionally abusive mother (Vivien Bridson) while working as a security guard in an underground parking garage. His neighbours play Hard Dance music at high levels all night and day, and Martin often spies on the rich individuals who use the parking garage. Dr. Sebring (Bill Hutchens) suspects that Martin was sexually abused repeatedly by his father, now in prison (a suspicion confirmed when Martin has a flashback to this abuse, in which the audience hears the father [voiced by Tom Six] raping his son).

Martin is obsessed with “The Human Centipede (First Sequence)”, watching it repeatedly at home and in his toll booth. At one point, he is depicted masturbating (graphically and on-screen) to the film with sandpaper wrapped around his penis. He keeps a centipede as a pet, and maintains a scrapbook on the film. When his mother destroys the scrapbook, Martin crushes her skull and then props her dead body up at the kitchen table. Martin wordlessly decides to recreate the fictional experiment he saw portrayed in The Human Centipede (First Sequence). Medically untrained, he assembles a potpourri of kitchen gadgets, woodworking tools, and assorted household items, puts them in a suitcase, and secures a dingy, dirty, dark abandoned warehouse to recreate the film’s medical experiment. But Martin intends to create not just a three-person centipede, but the “full sequence” of 12 connected people.

How do you review a film like “Human Centipede II”? It is one of the most vile, reprehensible, and ugly horror movies that I have ever seen? You want broken teeth, crushed babies, and explosive diarrhea? It’s all here. This is a film that completely succeeds in what it wants to do – gross out its small but intensive audience – and will do anything in its power to achieve it. Stylish and incredibly well made with some nice artistic touches here and there – I especially liked the “dinner table” scene. Nonetheless, none of this really adds up to very much which is a shame considering that Syx is a talented director with a lot more to offer. Overall, I can’t really recommend this film but I can’t recommend that you don’t see it either. Does that make any sense? This film exists in its own little world and there is something kind of special about that.

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