Somehow we’ve reached the stage where a movie about a human centipede is no longer a big deal. Who’s to blame for that? You might think it’s Tom Six, the “visionary” director behind the trilogy. But if his appearance here is anything to go by, he’s no creepier than any other 30-something man who regularly wears a fedora.
It’s not Dieter Laser either, returning to the series as the tyrannical governor of an overcrowded prison. What to do with all those inmates when you don’t have the money, space or psychological balance to accommodate them? We know the answer from minute one (hint: it involves a human centipede), but it’s an hour before he gets there.
Till then, nearly every scene has Laser bellowing ethnic or gender slurs in an accent that falls heavily on the German side of German-American. He’s unwatchable – more so than the waterboarding, castration or mouth being sewn to an anus – but when everything is turned to 11, it’s hard to blame him for the sense of boredom that sets in way before the centipede is unveiled.
No, let’s look to ourselves. We throw him our scraps of approval – a South Park reference here, an inappropriate baby romper there – and he feasts on them, working them through his guts until they’re thoroughly rancid, then crapping them back out again in the form of this laboured nonsense. The character he most resembles here isn’t himself, grasping for meta-textual lols, but the centipede: all of it, from the head, to the bodies in between, to the tail. If only we’d ignored him and Six from the start, they might have done something with their lives, like start a men’s rights blog, or moderate a sub-Reddit.
We’re terrible, terrible people, and this is the film we deserve.