The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)

Tom Six's second Human Centipede film is a black and white metafilm about a man who watches the first Human Centipede, a sentence that requires reading twice. Martin Lomax works a tollbooth, lives with an abusive mother, and keeps a scrapbook of his ambitions. He is obese, asthmatic, and intellectually impaired, and the film treats each of those facts as a special effect. The photography is handsome in a grim way. Laurence R. Harvey's performance carries a commitment the material neither deserves nor requests.

For all the attention it attracted, the film has nothing to say. Its cast is uniformly white. Its treatment of women is a sustained act of degradation with no counterargument offered. Its engagement with mental illness consists of pointing a camera at it and calling it a monster. There is no economic critique, no environmental dimension, no argument about the body beyond the body as receptacle. Racial justice does not appear, nor do the interior lives of anyone abducted. Other horror films of the decade smuggled in a thesis. This one smuggles in a staple gun and a sense of its own audacity.

At the Fantastic Fest premiere, the distributor handed out barf bags and parked an ambulance outside. The British Board of Film Classification refused it a certificate, then relented after thirty-two cuts. Six replied that it was all make-believe, which is true and also irrelevant. A film can be invented and still stand as a record of what its maker wished to look at. This one wished to look at a great deal and said nothing about any of it. As a specimen of social consciousness, it is a blank slide beneath the microscope. We file it, and we find nothing in the file.