The Human Centipede (2010)

Filmmaker Tom Six once made a joke of sewing a child-rapist perv’s mouth to a truck driver’s ass. Get it: When the fat hauler would crap, perv dude would get a meal. Somehow that crack, so to speak, gave Six the idea to make a horror movie about a whacky Nazi-inspired surgeon (Dieter Laser) who sews three youth (Ashley Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, and Akihiro Kitamura) together end to end, with the guy first in line. The whole affair is grisly, gross, and warped beyond measure, but Six smartly puts much of the gore and ick off screen and –- in a sly joke that somewhat backfires -- makes the mad doc the most boring horror villain one can imagine. This all comes apart, so to speak again, at the end when fat cops come knocking and the entire medical ordeal finally unravels as beyond preposterous: Mainly hydration and oxygen. There’s too little thrill here, the “Watch your back or else!” joke that forms the “Friday the 13^th” or “Elm Street” series, however campy they might be. It’s all just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  Again, so to speak. B