Shinfo week: "The Human Centipede II"

Hey, you know what's the single most awful piece of media I have ever consumed in my entire life?  "The Human Centipede II."

I'd never had the desire to see "The Human Centipede," and especially not "The Human Centipede II" after being coerced into watching the first by my stupid friends.

In fact, you know what?  These pieces of shit aren't even worthy of being recognized as pieces of entertainment.  I'm dropping the quotes around the names of both movies, and just abbreviating them from now on.

HC2 starts off in what is supposed to be "our world:" a world in which HC1 was actually just a movie, and a world in which it's the favorite movie of a bug-eyed, overweight, mentally retarded guy with a penchant for sandpapering his dick and pooping his pants.  He works in a parking garage and kills/captures people that piss him off a bit too much.

This guy, who never talks aside from random guttural noises and squeaks, is--I'll have to grudgingly hand it to the producers--incredibly disturbing looking and weird.  His life absolutely sucks; his mother wants to kill him, his father abused him as a child, his therapist wants to molest him.  It's an awful world.

This guy.

However, all the poor mentally handicapped guy wants to do is recreate his favorite movie, in real life.  And boy, does he ever.

Through an INSANELY huge amount of fortuitous concussions that he gives people with his trusty crowbar which allows him to move their unconscious bodies where he wants, he traps a whole entourage of 12 or so people.  These 12 people include one of the actresses from the first movie (as if her career wasn't already destroyed enough) as well as a pregnant woman.

Even more fortuitious for the mentally-handicapped man aside from the fact that 12 people are able to continually wake up from multiple concussions, his victims apparently cannot succumb to blood-borne illness OR die from blood loss, meaning he can chop them up with various kitchen utensils, staple them together and make his OWN CENTIPEDE.

I'm pretty much done with the story synopsis now.  The only relevant things that happen in the rest of the movie are gross as fuck, but here are the highlights: a bloody, naked pregnant woman births a baby in a car and drives away, the mentally handicapped guy makes the human centipede poop, he rapes the back end of the centipede after the pooping incident, the centipede breaks in half and then the guy gets a LIVE CENTIPEDE put into his pooper through a funnel.

One of these cute lil' guys right in the corn.

Yup.  This movie is such a piece of absolute shit I can barely stand to even think about it after the fact.  Its sole purpose is to gross the viewers out.  There's barely any artistic value in it, even despite the fact that for some reason the producers though it would be a good idea to shoot it in black and white.  

At least with the first movie, the storyline was semi-interesting even despite how ludicrous it was, and the final shot was slightly stirring even in all of its grossness.  With HC2, there is none of that.

In fact, the way that it treats its main character--the disgusting mentally-handicapped man ruined by life's circumstances--is actually an affront to anybody whose life has been personally affected by a mental disorder of the kind, be it retardation, klinefelter's, autism or otherwise.

The fact that the movie makes him an object as a character to be feared, and to not be understood, is frustrating; he is essentially a creepy, disgusting human being with reduced mental capacities which supposedly makes him all the more dangerous.  This is fine and is seen often in horror movie villains, but the fact that the movie focuses on him being mentally-retarded (and abused)  to explain all of his awful quirks is in itself lazy story-telling and demeaning to a huge group of people affected by things they cannot change.  He is an evil degenerate BECAUSE of his mental deficiencies, apparently.  As well, his reasons for emulating HC1 are never explained.

Aside from that, the movie is just.  Plain.  Gross.  When talking about shock in entertainment, there are two ways to go about in: horror and terror.  Terror is what precedes awful scenes, and horror is the feeling that is attained after seeing them.  The problem is, HC2 is all about the horror, and in place of terror, you get a collective groan of "oh god, I know what's coming..." or "sigh.  not this again..."

I would barely classify what HC2 gives you as "horror" though.  It's not even shock.  It's straight-up revulsion, what Stephen King would call the cheapest and most classless of all of the feelings that horror media can give you.

"AHHH HAH, I KNOW REVULSION IS A STUPID SCARE TACTIC AND NOW I'M RICH OFF OF IT."

There's no thought given to what will spook the audience most or what will pick at their psyches after the movie is over.  Instead, what it offers is gross-out moments of gore and depravity, of which are NOT.  SCARY.  Just fucking disgusting and stupid.

It's absolutely incredible that such a piece of garbage was made, especially after all of the negative press that the first movie received.  Of course, bad PR is still PR, and so with all of the attention that HC1 received for how horrible it was, it's actually not a stretch to imagine why a sequel was made.

The only thing that you can do, faced with such awful, shitty film-making, acting and planning on the part of the producer, is to laugh and be amazed at how bad it all is.  And thus, more people watch these... movies (I sometimes even hesitate to call these things films), more interest is generated and then the franchise is able to propagate itself.  It's a shitty cycle for a shitty concept, and as long as it makes money, it's going to continue.

Ah well.  Thus is the entertainment world, and thus is life.

Happy shinfo week, this movie is the greatest piece of shinfo of them all.  Do not see it. It has no redeeming qualities.