Director: Tom Six
Writer: Tom Six
Stars: Dieter Laser, Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie
Run Time: 1 Hour, 32 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/38CheM0
Synopsis
We open on Dr. Heiter sitting in his car looking at pictures of dogs standing mouth-to-butt. He arranges the photos to move the dogs closer together to where they are overlapping. He gets out of the car and follows a man into the woods. He shoots him with a tranquilizer gun. Credits roll.
Lindsay and Jenny, a couple of American girls, are on vacation in Germany. They’re out at night driving to a dance club and get lost on the dark road. Naturally, they get a flat tire. They leave the car and set out on foot to find help. Finally, they find a house. Guess who answers the door? It’s Dr. Heiter.
He pretends to call the tow truck and gives the girls some water, drugged of course. They both wake up chained to hospital beds, alongside the truck driver from the pre-credit scene. The truck driver “isn’t a match,” so the doctor kills him and buries him in the garden next to his “Three-Hound.”
Heiter brings home a Japanese man named Katsuro as another prisoner the next morning. Heiter explains that he’s the leading surgeon in separating Siamese twins. Nowadays, he’s more interested in joining rather than separating people. He’s going to cut their kneecaps and then sew them together, mouth to anus, creating a Siamese Triplet, or as he calls it, a “human centipede.”
Lindsay manages to untie herself and run. When he has her trapped, he explains that “you will be the middle piece!” Lindsay goes back for Jenny, who is sedated. He shoots Lindsay with a tranquilizer, and begins the operation.
Time passes, and the centipede begins healing. “I did it!” he screams as he gets all teary-eyed with joy. Heiter makes them go out in the yard and play fetch with him. Then he feeds the lead segment from a dog food bowl. Then the lead has to poop, and that means it’s time for the second segment to eat. The third segment only gets what the second one doesn’t digest. It’s all very nasty.
Jenny, the third segment, appears to be dying of infection. As he examines her, the police arrive. They are concerned about someone hearing screams. Heiter intends to replace the ailing Jenny with the two detectives, creating a quadruplet, but they leave to get a search warrant before he can drug them.
While Heiter is dealing with the police, the centipede gets loose. They cut up Heiter’s legs, and then slowly try to climb up the basement steps with Heiter in a very slow, crawling pursuit. During the difficult climb, Jenny starts to tear loose from the two in front of her.
As they try to break out the window, Heiter crawls up behind them with a scalpel. Katsuro gives a long speech in Japanese about his bad lifestyle and God’s revenge, and then he cuts his own throat. The two girls share his circulatory system, so they start dying as well.
Then the police come back with a search warrant. Heiter shoots them both but dies in the process. The two girls slowly die as well, connected to the still-bleeding Katsuro and with no one left alive to help them…
Commentary
Dieter Laser is a genuinely creepy-looking guy, and he pulls off the crazy mad scientist with a lot of style. All three of the “segments” are wearing underwear, and I only want to know how they put them on sewn together like that.
The tagline was “100% scientifically accurate.” I’m no doctor, but I suspect this may not be completely true. Still, the mad scientist’s premise is shown in diagrams and looks feasible enough in the short term. No one would survive long like this, but they might last a few days. Still, the tag line says it’s “100% scientifically accurate,” so what do I know?
Overall, it’s well shot and decently acted. The gore is good, and the plot, while silly, is very entertaining. I’ve heard so many bad things about this film, but I thought it was actually worthwhile.