The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) ****

Directed by Tom Six. Starring Laurence R Harvey, Ashlynn Yennie, Maddi Black, Kandace Caine, Dominic Borrelli, Lucas Hansen, Lee Nicholas Harris, Dan Burman, Daniel Jude Gennis, Georgia Goodrick, Emma Lock, Katherine Templar, Peter Blankenstein. UK, 88 mins. 18.

UK DVD Release date - 21st November 2011

Martin is a sick, sick man. He's overweight, asthmatic and wears coke-bottle glasses. He's also sick of mind. Working as a car-park attendant, this strange little loner spends his day watching Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence) ... and planning to create his own.

Martin (Harvey) doesn't plan to make his own movie, though. Oh no. He wants to create his own REAL human centipede, with 12 rather unwilling subjects. And so he begins collecting his segments, snatching people as they come to collect their cars and taking them to a disused warehouse, where he puts his plan into action and begins asssembling his centipede.

Human Centipede 2 is a very different film to the original. For a start, it's shot in black and white. It's also very grim, visceral and dirty, whereas everything in the first film was clean, clinical and sterile. It's always raining, and Martin himself is constantly filthy. And where, in the first film, none of the surgery was shown - that was left to the audience's imagination - here, Six is happy to show everything - right down to the removal of kneecaps and tongues.

Human Centipede 2 is also a very clever sequel. It treats the first film as a piece of fiction, and shows what happens when a viewer is "influenced" by such a film. And this appears to be precisely the point that was missed by the BBFC when it banned the film's release in the UK, saying that there was a real risk that it could cause genuine harm to anyone who saw it (of course, it didn't cause any harm to those BBFC members who saw it). People being influenced by films to carry out evil acts is precisely what Six is satirising in Human Centipede 2, and doing so with a knowing wink to the audience. The BBFC also made itself look rather foolish. A mere two months after stating categorically that the film could never be released in the UK, not even in a cut form, the board has awarded HC2 an 18 certificate after two and a half minutes of footage was removed. So the board now considers this unshowable, uncuttable, damaging film OK after all? What, then, made it come to its original decision that it was the ultimate "video nasty" that would deprave and corrupt society? We will probably never know. Still, at least Tom Six now joins an illustirious group of directors including Sam Raimi, Ruggero Diodato and Wes Craven who have fallen foul of our self-appointed moral guardians - and come out the other side looking all the better for it.

Martin is a sick man, but also a very unsympathetic character. We do get a little understanding of why he is the way he is. He still lives with his mother, who hates him. Why? Because her husband is in jail for sexually abusing Martin when he was a boy. But it's hard to feel sympathy for this weird little man who keeps a scrapbook of images from The Human Centipede and masturbates with sandpaper while looking through it. It's also clear that even though he has been victimised and abused himself, Martin feels no empathy at all for other people.

The Human Centipede films have been a breath of fresh air for the horror genre. Yes, the first film was just a twist on the mad scientist movie, but the idea of stitching people together arse-to-mouth was so original and horrifying that it had people retching at the mere concept. The second film takes it a step further, by ridiculing the notion that anyone can be driven to copy what they see in a film. Both films are also full of dark humour, and it's clear that Six - a very smart and underrated filmmaker - is having a massive laugh at the expense of his critics. It's going to be fascinatiing to see what he does with the final film in his Human Centipede trilogy.

Stuart O'Connor. Review first published by Screenjabber.com

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