Grotesque film parodies first installment

What makes a good film?

It’s a simple question that’s also crushingly difficult to answer — film is a varied, dynamic art form that features ever-changing definitions of quality. What if a film isn’t enjoyable in any sense of the word? What, exactly, justifies a movie’s existence?

It’s questions such as these that The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) demands be answered.

The original film, The Human Centipede (First Sequence), was a fantastically grotesque lightning rod of controversy. This, of course, was entirely predictable: The film depicted a horrifying doctor on an experimental quest to sew together three people mouth-to-anus, forming a “human centipede.”

The second follows a mentally ill, sexually and emotionally abused British man who, inspired by the original film, decides to copycat the centipede experiment, with some disturbing new ambitions.

Before we go on, here’s an official disclaimer: This movie is, for better or worse, everything it was hyped up to be. Director Tom Six made a point to declare the second film would be dramatically more graphic, and he certainly kept his word.

In that sense, The Human Centipede 2 is an unfortunate success. It’s the sort of film that would handily win the Oscar for “most jaw-droppingly disgusting feature,” if such an award existed.

What Six does to craft the film’s disturbed ethos is immense: It feels as if every frame is dripping with horrific details, from the skin-crawling sound of lips being licked to the claustrophobic black-and-white compositions that dominate the movie. The Human Centipede 2 begins with an extremely deliberate pace, and the drawn-out sequences only intensify the already overwhelming sensation of discontent inspired by the movie.

The problem, however, is that the first act of the film comes off as surprisingly banal. Though seeing innocent victims get shot, beaten and tied up is shocking at first, the sheer repetition of it all translates into predictability.

This changes as The Human Centipede 2 transits into the actual “experimentation.” It’s here that the film flexes its muscles — Six almost seems to take glee from the roller-coaster ride of brutality, blood and fecal matter that he escalates into torturous new heights.

It’s too much for a premise that proved plenty revolting the first time around sans this sort of graphic detail. It’s no joyride by any sense of the word — even the most perverted viewers will probably shake their heads in disbelief.

On initial judgment, this God-awful obsession with portraying depravity in explicit fashion seems to steal any value from anything The Human Centipede 2 could have possibly been trying to say. Who can take anything away from 87 straight minutes of hammers smashing teeth, surgery with staple guns and gag-inducing torture?

Seriously, who sits through that?

The Human Centipede 2, taken at face value, is a film no one should see. The plot is contrived — the concept of an abused, bullied loner turning deranged is a cliché by now — and the dialogue is borderline unbearable. The violence is beyond extreme and Six knows it.

Though the performance of stage veteran Laurence R. Harvey (as the film’s antagonist Martin Lomax) is incredible — stunning, really — to watch on screen, it still doesn’t appear to save the film from its shortcomings.

But then again, Six really does know all this. He seems to know everything: the reaction that The Human Centipede 2 incites, the criticisms of the original film, the argument surrounding modern shock-horror’s value to the film world, his self-conscious role as a director in the middle of it all.

This is where The Human Centipede 2 begins to justify itself. It makes Six’s decision to call attention to the movie itself logical — there are numerous sequences where the original The Human Centipede is referenced, often in a narcissistic, obvious way. It feels like a mockery on screen, a way to parody the legitimacy of his own movies and the shock-horror genre as a whole.

And with greater analysis, it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint whether the movie’s initial flaws are actually flaws or not. Are the plot holes, the sheer stupidity of the victims, the unnecessary everything really signs of shoddy filmmaking? Or is Six just smarter than all of us? The inclusion of a mind-twistingly ambiguous ending sends everything into flux.

In that sense, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) stands disgustingly — but proudly — above many of the brain-numbing, predictable mainstream flicks to come out this year. It is a movie that will pester you with questions and will inevitably demand thought in its sheer mastery of the revolting. This aspect is not one that can be easily dismissed.

And because of all this, The Human Centipede 2 cannot be confined to a star rating.

So, who sits through films like The Human Centipede 1 and 2? Apparently, we do.

More crucially, what does it say about people, about human nature and the vastness of imagination, of fantasy, of why we would actually pay for what is so clearly terrible for the soul?

Somewhere, Tom Six is laughing.