The first day of Fantastic Fest can sometimes be the most important one. Energies are high and there is always a high amount of buzz circulating the festivals Opening Night Premiere. The job of such a premiere is to set the tone for audiences; It helps the audiences to adjust to this small microscopic sized world where the strange and taboo will, for 8 days, become social acceptable, or even worse, comedic. Past years openers have included high profile films such as Zack and Miri, and Let Me In, and for the most part, these films haven’t really served a shock and awe purpose. Last night at the opening of the 2011 Fantastic Fest, the rules were completely re-written with the world premiere of Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence.
Now one of the more unfortunate side effects of choosing a film such as HC:2 as your opener, is that it sort of obligates some of us less than enthused Press Badge holders to attend something that perhaps we would otherwise never seek out. Let me be frank, I’ve never seen the first Centipede movie and to be honest, I never really had any interest in looking into this grotesque franchise. Don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for the horror genre and all of it’s bastard children, but this whole gore-porn thing never particularly interested me. Plus, since the movies are usually devoid of any substantial narrative, you can usually get the highlights from somebody else latera and still get the full jist of the film without ever having to set foot in a theater. I don’t much care to see films like Cannibal Holocaust or Human Centipede, but yet here I was, stuck in line for twin sold out screenings of the world premiere of HC:2.
Upon entering the theater, I immediately set about creating a few mental survival tactics, the most important of which, was to try and disassociate myself from the images that were soon to appear on screen. If I could just get these horrid images to register simply as just cheesy special effects, I believed they would thus lose their ability to gross me out. However right off the bat, Festival creator Tim League set out to make sure this would not be possible.
It started with a special deal on chili fries, and then moved straight into a pre-show eating contest between three unlucky audience members. The food in question, was what seemed to be some sort of peanut butter/chocolate substance contained within a 12″+ sausage skin. If you have yet to figure out what the intent of such a meal was, well then I’ll just count you lucky and leave the rest to your imagination.
The next item up on the agenda, was to make everybody aware of the Human Centipede Survival Kit which stood on the table before them. This kit consisted of but a staple remover inside a barf bag, and I immediately hoped I would not be needing the use of either. Then, after all the silly gags had been put to rest, it was time for a brief Fantastic Fest bumper (consisting of video from an actual vasectomy procedure), and then the main event.
HC:2 for the most part features a whole new cast of characters, and an almost completely independent story from the first. Shot in black and white, it is a journey into the demented mind of Martin, the deranged security guard of a parking garage whose love for the original Human Centipede film drives him to test the story’s toted ‘100% Medically Accurate’ claim for himself; this time, with 12 people instead of 3. Now around this point you will either be thinking “Oh man this is awesome” or “Oh man this is likely the worse thing I’ve ever heard of”.
The first half of HC:2 was relatively painless. Sure a few people got bludgeoned with a crowbar and a few lucky others managed to get spared and shot, but there really wasn’t too much of that gross factor that had become a staple of the first film. However, I knew this reprieve from the grotesque couldn’t be too long lived, and slowly, as Martin’s twisted fantasy slowly began to develop into a terrifying reality, the gross factor finally showed up in full force.
I could ruin your appetite by going into extreme detail as to what happened in the second half of the film, but I don’t currently have the stomach for it, and I’m not sure many of the HeyUGuys readers do either. However I will mention some of the wonderful types of things that you will see should you decide to embark upon this journey yourself. Such a journey includes, but is not limits to: Child birth, baby mutilation, genital mutilation, excrement (duh), low cost dental procedures, do it yourself style surgery, nudity, rape, creely freudian psychologists, a host of other things you probably could do without seeing. There will be points in the film where you, like myself, will see events moving in certain directions and you will say to yourself “They aren’t really going to show that are they?” And then you will be swiftly answered when they go ahead and show exactly what you hoped they wouldn’t.
With the film now firmly behind me, I am forced to somehow devise a rating system by which to judge it, and this gives me mixed feelings. Tom Six’s film is most likely one of the most brutal and visually grotesque things I have ever seen on the big screen, but as much as I hated it, I am reluctant to give the film too terrible a rating. HC:2 was never shown on the premise that it would have great narrative content. It’s not supposed to be an Academy Award winning film. It’s goal is to shock it’s viewers into submission, all the while producing a light amount of vomit in the back of our throats. To be honest, this is exactly what it did.
Laurence R. Harvey’s performance as Martin was one of eeriest performances I have ever seen on film. He came off as sort of a Norman Bates meets Danny DeVito as the penguin and I am instantly convinced that the man has enough chops to make it in the A-List world should he get the chance. The cinematography of the film was as equally disturbing and the choice to shoot in black & white really added a gritty feel that was most certainly non-existent in the glossier original. When asked ‘how his mother felt’ about his film, Tom Six explained that this has never been a franchise he has been ashamed of. Even his mother is able to appreciate it for what it is; a gore-porn gem. To be honest, we asked for a film like this by parading it around the media and laughing along to the South Park spoof. Who are we to be totally up in arms when somebody like Six gives us exactly what we ourselves essentially asked for?
[Rating 2.5/5]
