Horror Movie Round-Up

[RottingCorpse]

So, I'm starting to think I'm way too tame for the 21st century horror scene.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is an unconventional – and medically accurate -- biological horror film that enthusiastically explores territory that few filmmakers dare to tread. When two pretty American girls go on a road trip in Europe, they end up alone at night in Germany with a broken car in the woods. They search for help and find an isolated villa, and awake the next day to find themselves trapped in a terrifying makeshift basement hospital. Their captor is the internationally respected Siamese twin surgeon Dr. Josef Heiter with a demented vision for mankind's future existence. Dr. Heiter wants to remove human beings' kneecaps so they have to exist on all fours and then surgically graft them mouth-to-anus to form a centipede chain. But when his victims give him more trouble than he expects – including unwanted attention from the authorities - Dr. Heiter is forced to decide whether to abandon his latest project, or protect it from the outside world – with their and his very lives, if necessary.

Check this out for funky sketched diagrams. (Not exactly NSFW, but I wouldn't want to have to explain what I'm looking at.)

http://www.joblo.com/arrow/index.php?id=21407

[nacho]

When two pretty American girls go on a road trip in Europe, they end up alone at night-- 

What?  Sorry!  Um... and awake the next day to find themselves trapped in a terrifying makeshift basement hospital -- 


Huh?  Oh fuck!  What happened to those girls?!?!

[RottingCorpse]

Trailer for The Human Centipede. I think I'm going to have to be really drunk to watch this.

[RottingCorpse]

The best part of the Elm Street remake? The trailer for Piranha 3D.

Christopher Lloyd FTW!

[Matt]

So someone critiques The Human Centipede vs. The Very Hungry Caterpillar... http://thevaultofhorror.blogspot.com/2010/05/human-centipede-vs-very-hungry.html

[RottingCorpse]

Nacho and monkey, this is the review for The Human Centipede I was talking about that breaks down exactly why the movie is terrible.

Spoiler Alert: In order to review a movie as bad as this, I’ll have to spoil a few things to show just how nonsensical the damned thing is.

It takes a lot for me to want to walk out on a movie. I’ve never actually stood up and headed out the door, and beyond the need to keep my streak alive, I’ve seen some terribly bad films in my time which has built up mental callouses towards the stuff on the lower end of the spectrum. It never usually enters my mind, but about half way through The Human Centipede (First Sequence), I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to be in the theater anymore. You might assume that’s because of the film’s gross out concept, but it’s actually because the film exhibits terrible writing, directing and execution for a full hour and a half runtime.

Two girls (Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie) vacationing in Germany are kidnapped by a mad scientist (Dieter Laser) who wants to sew them together ass to mouth to a Japanese guy (Ashihiro Kitamura) to create a human centipede connected by a common digestive tract.

Look, I’ll admit that the concept is fantastic. It’s also vomit-inducing, and I’d never want my mother seeing it, but it’s only got enough legs to last as a five-minute short. Unfortunately, director Tom Six thought that he had a winner and drags it out 1800% longer than it needs to be.

The first failure of the film is the writing which is about as flat as it gets. The characters have zero personality. We don’t know anything about them, and it makes it hard to care about them beyond the simple response to seeing anyone succumb to that gruesome fate. The two girls generally say exactly what’s happening on the screen to them, and it’s clear that neither can improvise while walking through a dank forest – repeating things over and over until it’s obvious that the most of the scenes are filler. They might as well have been called Girl A and Girl B. The Japanese character Katsuro is introduced while he’s passed out, and we’re offered nothing of who he is until an impassioned speech (more on that later) that comes out of left field near the end.

The one exception here is Diter Laser channeling Udo Kier who stands out as the only not completely awful actor in the movie. His German scientist is understandably creepy mostly by virtue of what he’s trying to achieve, but Laser does offer an unsettling personality when he’s not pretending he’s in a soap opera.

Beyond the dialog, the story is completely lacking because the concept doesn’t dictate anything plotwise. It’s high concept, but there are a ton of scenes that could have been cut from the beginning, middle and end without the movie losing anything. In fact, it could use a keen editing session. There’s nothing that makes this fact more obvious than the many opportunities that the girls have to escape. Imagine it. The worst fate imaginable – that your mouth will be grafted to someone else’s asshole and you’ll have to eat shit until the scientist lets you go or you die – and the girls sort of still run around like morons. Off the top of my head: there’s the time Lindsay is in a bedroom alone with a telephone, the time when she makes it out into the yard and could easily run away and return with help, the fact that they have full use of their hands and could rip the staples from their mouths, the time Katsuro (the front of the ‘pede) stabs Dr. Heiter in the leg and fails to stab in right in the face to ensure his demise, and the time Katsuro drops a perfectly good lamp in favor of a tiny sliver of glass to go up against a hobbled Dr. Heiter.

The ultimate winner in that category is right after Katsuro drops the blunt object and gives a speech not about how they are inches away from breaking through a window and escaping but about how he’s been a bad person all his life (new information for the audience) and how he deserved to have his asshole sewn to a mildly hot girl’s mouth. He then, spoilerifically, proceeds to cut his own throat. For no reason. At all. He’s endured at least three days of hell and on the cusp of escaping and living out his days untethered by mildly hot girls, he kills himself out of nowhere. Suicide has never been so random.

Director Tom Six clearly had nowhere to go and sacrifices common sense (and the fight or flight nature of human beings) in order to arbitrarily keep the victims in harm’s way.

The last problem with the writing is that it displays a fundamental ignorance of police work, human nature, and biology. Two police officers enter into the picture to find the missing girls, but they are written and acted as if the director were basing them off of B-grade detective movies instead of actual police officers. Neither of them know procedure or rules about probable cause, and they leave and come back in twenty minutes (with the world’s fastest warrant) simply because the scene demanded they leave for a while. Tonally, it’s not bad because it mirrors a moment earlier in the film where the dear Dr. Heiter leaves for a while simply because the story needed one of the girls to almost escape. Seriously. She is cornered in a pool (where she holds her breath for a few minutes and comes back up to be…exactly in the same dilemma as a few minutes before) and the power cuts out while the electronic pool cover slides across threatening death by drowning. It’s a scene that has some promise to it, and then it’s interrupted by a plot device to get Dr. Heiter busy for a long, long time (instead of, you know, knocking her out before he worries about going to fix the fuse box).

If I’m beginning to sound bitter, it’s because there are scenes all over the place in this movie that will frustrate, especially those who hate common horror tropes where people choose the non-existent third option between fighting, flighting, or wandering around because the movie still has 70 more minutes to fill contractually. Oh, and the idea of a human centipede as it stands is a great idea for a horror flick, but it’s not anywhere near biologically accurate. This wouldn’t be a problem, and the film itself shouldn’t be faulted for it, but the director brags that he worked with a doctor to make it medically sound. That doctor should have his or her license taken away. Either that statement means that human skin can be grafted to human skin (true!) or that a human can live on feces for a while (false!).

So what about when the centipede is finally made? Isn’t there a great fulfillment in seeing something that atrocious end up on screen? Well, there would be, but the director chooses that moment to hold back. It’s like listening to a sleepy carnival barker blather on for several hours before opening the freak show curtain to reveal an old shoe.

Instead of creating a disgusting surgery scene, he creates one that’s pretty tame. Even the end result of the centipede isn’t all that gore-celebrating. There’s a hint of disgust when Katsuro finally has to go Number Two, but there’s no visual to go along with it, and the sounds and motions that the girl in the Number Two spot makes are the same ones she’s made almost the entire movie. Basically, the audience has to do all the imaginary work – the movie doesn’t help out even a little. Ultimately, it’s an uninspired, a wasted effort on a vile concept. For anyone who reads the logline and gets excited, I’d imagine they’d want something far grosser and sans underwear. After all, if the doctor is creating a pet, why would he allow them to wear underwear? Come to think of it, how could they wear underwear when they are grafted via asshole? The list of confusing questions goes on.

There is one solitary scene that works well. When Dr. Leiter tells the victims what he plans on doing, the psychological impact is huge and its played for the height of disturbance.

And kudos go out to the good doctor for achieving a complex surgery on three people without an anesthesiologist. Usually even the simplest of surgeries requires someone to constantly monitor the anesthesia levels so the patient doesn’t die. But not Dr. Leiter! He’s incredible. He even lifts up the three people onto an exam table without tearing their stitches. All by himself. Incredible.

Plus, he’s pretty phenomenal when he kills a cop (off camera of course) despite only having a scalpel. It’s not often that a movie has scalpel emerge as the winner of gun vs. scalpel, but it was a brave choice, and the movie should be lauded for it.

The massive bulk of Human Centipede is heavy, anti-fun dreck that ends up with a lame pay off. It should be noted that it won the Best Horror Feature award at Fantastic Fest, but I have to assume it was the concept more than the execution. Reading the summary is enough to get a gist of the depths that the human mind can go to without needing to sit through a terribly written, terribly acted, terribly directed, terribly shot excuse for a gross out film that’s not even all that disgusting.

The Upside: The concept.

The Downside: Everything else.

On the Side: Director Tom Six is promising a sequel to the film called The Human Centipede (Complete Sequence) that will have 12 human beings sewn together.

[nacho]

Rough Cut!

A documentary about a horror movie that resulted in a real life murder... Downloading now.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0763850/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10950068/ns/dateline_nbc/page/3/
http://www.horror.com/php/article-146-1.html
http://www.toddklick.com/roughcut/documentary.php

[RottingCorpse]

Trailer for Wes Craven's latest, My Soul to Take. Looks okay. I have a soft spot for Craven, even the bad stuff.

http://movies.yahoo.com/premieres/21450210/standardformat

[nacho]

Downloading the current big horror film doing the festival circuit...Burning Bright. I don't want to, but how can I possibly say no to this description?

After her mother’s death, Kelly (Briana Evigan) is left to care for her autistic brother; meanwhile her stepfather poaches her college fund to buy a tiger. Exacerbating the situation further, a fierce hurricane is heading towards her home. Even worse, Kelly and her brother become trapped inside the house with the hungry man-eating predator. Together they must fight for their lives in a deadly game of (very large) cat and mouse.

How in the world did that get made?  And why is everyone talking about it?

I love how half the IMDB comments don't get the title.  What, they haven't taken an English class since 5th grade?

IMDB comments:

Are there plot holes? Yes. Could this have gone to theatres? Probably not. But if your expectations are low, you love tigers and enjoy decent thrillers, you will probably find this entertaining enough.

If you love tigers...then call now! 

I must admit that we spent most of the film yelling for her to watch out and close the doors behind her.

First thing I'm thinking.  What, does this tiger have thumbs? And she can't get out of the hurricane house because it's "boarded up."  So... Does she not have thumbs?

Only watch this if you're stoned, so bored that you cannot physically be rendered any more bored, or ill in bed taking the day off work.

Sounds like one for work!

[Tatertots]

Ok, what are the best horror films of the past few years? I've been so out of touch. I need to catch up.

[nacho]

Ok, what are the best horror films of the past few years? I've been so out of touch. I need to catch up.

How many years?  Just the past five or so? Is that when you began your job pushing stones up hills? Let's make it JUST the last five years to frustrate RC!  Here's my list:

[REC] (2008)

Let the Right One In (2008)

Descent, maybe (2005).  But only the European version. 

[RottingCorpse]

Here's my top ten horror movies of the decade list. The Mist is really good too. At least the ending is.

http://www.greatsociety.org/forums/index.php/topic,4459.msg125109.html#msg125109

[nacho]

Oh, he's not playing the game.

But, yes, I agree with the list.  Except for Trick R Treat.  And Behind the Mask.

And can we crossover with sci-fi?  Because Moon and Sunshine had some wonderful horror elements...

[Tatertots]

Awesome, thanks!

My horror dearth started when I started dating that last girlfriend from college. She hated horror and never wanted to watch any, so I lost the habit.

Moon and Sunshine have been on my list for a while. Need to get those in.

Hey! I liked Trick R Treat! Let the Right One In was fantastic, as well.

[nacho]

Everybody but me likes Trick R Treat.