THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 — SHOCKTOBER!

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John Waters introduced a dog-poo-eating Divine as "the Filthiest Person Alive" in "Pink Flamingos" (1972). In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini merged the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" with the three descending levels of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno" in "Salo" for a terse satire about the world's implosion of force-fed consumerist debauchery after World War II.

Eating society's shit served as the shocking height of bourgeoisie aspirations in “Salo.” It was Pasolini’s last film before he was brutally murdered on a remote beach on the outskirts of Rome.

It would be another 39 years before Tom Six would take the literal and metaphorical implications of eating shit to its most personal if asexual dimensions with a nasty little horror film entitled "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" in 2009. Promise for the sequel was already writ large in Six's mind when he created the diabolical thriller that united three barely clad human beings ATM (ass-to-mouth) as part of an evil German doctor's clinical experiment/fantasy.

With its scat-sex element buried neatly inside a torture-porn horror thriller built on clichés of the genre, Six alluded to a brief if disturbing social commentary about issues of racist and nationalist ideas without hitting nails on their heads. The front of the human chain was a Japanese man. The back of the body-train included two nubile American girls. The film was set in Germany after all.

The follow-up is much harder to read. Set in London, and clearly filmed on a considerably lower budget than the first film, the sequel is a self-referential bird-flip at the powers that postured toward banning "The Human Centipede 2" sight unseen.

Cheap, raw, disgusting, and yet cleverly tipping its nightmare hat toward the kind of Halloween spook-house-movie that fans of the genre expect, the black-and-white sequel climaxes with a symphony of farting and diarrhea as it passes through ten people linked in an rough-hewn human chain by a sexually-abused man-child misfit named Martin.

The bug-eyed geek works alone as an attendant in an underground London car garage where he continuously watches a DVD of "The Human Centipede" on his laptop. Martin treasures a carefully maintained "Human Centipede (First Sequence)" scrapbook which features things like a headshot of Ashlynn Yennie who appeared in the film. A telling comic sub-plot involves Martin's successful attempts at "auditioning" actors from the first film under the conceit that Quentin Tarantino is directing the sequel.

Anyone who has read Jonathan Swift will recognize the latent satire that bleeds and seeps from the story even if it seems written with notably less rigor than Swift applied to his work. Still, Tom Six's sequel isn't as lazy as, say, a typical Gus Van Sant movie. There is a certain Brechtian theory at play, however fortunate or unintentional it might be on Six’s part. The filmmaker toys with the idea of “what is seen cannot be unseen.” Victims are killed only to be revived so they can suffer greater tortures than their brutal death. Emotional detachment comes with the territory.

“The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)" is a cinematic provocation in line with banned films such as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Nekromantik.” It is meant as a right-to-passage movie for young audiences to marvel at, and endure without vomiting if possible.

The movie doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a very uncomfortable cinematic experience. To that end it succeeds with flying colors. The viewer’s defense mechanisms flinch to laugh at brutal acts it cannot logically fathom.

Will this movie give nightmares to more than a few of the audiences who manage to last through it? You bet. Will it give ideas to sick-fuck prison guards at Guantánamo about new ways to torture their prisoners? If they’re anything like Martin, the film will probably have that unintended effect as well. Does that mean “The Human Centipede 2” should be banned? I don’t think so.

Rated R. 96 mins.

BREAKING THE WAVES — SHOCKTOBER!

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It's impossible to know when you are watching film like "Breaking the Waves" that you are witnessing the high watermark of a filmmaker's career.

Made shortly after Lars von Trier (he added the "von" himself) co-authored with Thomas Vinterberg the strident "Dogme 95 Manifesto" for low-budget filmmaking, "Breaking the Waves" comes with a clarity of vision and social urgency that is an assault on the senses and the intellect. Von Trier leaves no stone unturned.

In her breakout performance Emily Watson plays Bess McNeill, a simple-minded Scottish, Calvinist churchgoer who marries Jan Nyman (Stellan Skarsgard), and oil rig worker who suffers a terrible accident that leaves him paralyzed. Bess McNeill's worldview is hampered by the religious indoctrination she has gone through.

Intimate conversations with God, in which Bess takes on both roles, provide insight into her sincere but ill-conceived thought process. Nonetheless, the love that Jan and Bess share is real as her imagination brings her to God. 

When Jan urges Bess to go out and have sex with other men and report back to him her carnal experiences, she takes Jan's wishes beyond the realm of common sense. In her mind Bess is helping cure Jan from his dire circumstance.

Cinematographer Robby Muller’s documentary shooting style favors intimate close-ups to reveal characters’ inner emotional lives. Muller captures Scotland’s rugged atmosphere as a supporting character to the Shakespearian tragedy on hand.

Although fiercely criticized for its shaky handheld camerawork, the technique gives the film an ungrounded sensibility of floating on roiling waves. Naturally, film and television industries coopted von Trier’s technique so much so that it doesn’t stand out at all.

The film's seven-acts are marked by colorful postcard chapter headings accompanied by songs such as Mott The Hopple's "All the Way From Memphis" for Chapter One — Bess Gets Married or Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" to announce Chapter Six.

Lars von Trier makes a clever attack on organized religion that resonates with Bunuel's famous line, "I'm an atheist, thank God." Emily Watson gives an angelic if earth-shattering performance that is transgressive, cathartic, and viscerally painful.

Here is a film that makes you feel like you've read the novel, seen the movie, and lived the life of a protagonist more empathetic than any other. You just might need a stiff drink afterward but you will have witnessed one of the best films of all time. 

Rated R. 159 mins.

THE VANISHING — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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George Sluizer’s spellbinding adaptation of Tim Krabbé’s horror novella “The Golden Egg” is such an expertly layered suspense thriller than it serves as a textbook archetype of the genre. It is that rare movie that successfully breaks an essential rule of dramaturgy — in this case that “good must always triumph” — in the interest of being true to a story with only one inevitable end. It’s the kind of movie that no grandmother wants to see, and they shouldn’t.

In scenes as measured as anything Hitchcock committed at his height of form, George Sluizer introduces Rex Hofman and Saskia Wagter, a pair of young Dutch lovers vacationing in France during the Tour de France.

Johanna ter Steege’s freckled faced strawberry-blonde Saskia comes to represent the absent object of Rex’s stifled affection, but not before winning the audience’s heart too.

Saskia is terrified of the dark. She suffers from recurring nightmares about being trapped in a golden egg in which she floats alone in space forever. If it sounds like a premonition; it is.

With bicycles attached to the car’s roof, the couple runs out of gas on a dark road at night. They argue. Rex abandons Saskia. He pays a price of profound dread before he gratefully sees Saskia waiting in a bright patch of road at the end of a long tunnel the next morning. Sadly, the couple’s encouraging reunion is brief. A stopover at a gas station for cold drinks is all it takes for Saskia to vanish from Rex’s life forever, thanks to the handiwork of a madman.

Sluizer introduces us to the self-admitted sociopath, chemistry teacher Raymond Lemorne, in an elliptical sub-plot movement that explains the backstory of Saskia’s methodical kidnapper in seamlessly woven flashbacks.

The filmmaker works with an optic image system of passages to confine the viewer within Raymond’s claustrophobic mindset. Raymond is so afraid of being confined that he has a special permit that allows him to drive without wearing a seatbelt. The audience is covertly manipulated to empathize with Raymond’s family man antagonist as we watch him interacting with his wife and children. Sequences of Raymond practicing his skills to kidnap a woman at various locations ramps up the sense of dread.

When we are reconnected with Rex, three years have passed. He looks older, haggard. He has a new girlfriend who acknowledges Rex’s obsession with discovering the truth of what happened to the love of his life. Still, she’s at her rope’s end. Rex still puts up posters with Saskia’s picture, asking for information. He goes on a television news program to challenge the kidnapper to come forward without fear of being punished, for the sole purpose of satisfying Rex’s romantically fanned curiosity.

The adage, “Be careful what you wish for,” couldn’t be more apt in this situation. Rex does indeed meet his lover’s kidnapper. The enemies go on a dark journey to discover Saskia’s fate.

The romantic connection between Rex and Saskia enables the film to achieve its catharsis, through an entropy of both choice and fate.

Not Rated. 107 mins.