Posts Tagged ‘Germany’


Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor

April 20th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Harald Reinl
1963 / Mosaik Film / 84′
a.k.a. The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle
 written by Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk
cinematography by Ernst W. Kalinke
music by Oskar Sala
starring Karin Dor, Harry Riebauer, Dieter Eppler, Rudolf Fernau, Ingmar Zeisberg, Hans Nielsen, and Hans Reiser

Former colonialist bureaucrat Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau) has found a pretty sweet set-up for himself. He’s soon to be knighted for his crimes against humanity/deeds for the British Empire, and spends his life sponging off the money belonging to his niece Claridge Dorsett (the inevitable Karin Dor) which he is uses to rent most of the castle of a certain Lord Blackmoor (Walter Giller). Oh, and he also has an oven full of stolen raw diamonds he’s slowly selling off to the – of course – shady bar owner Tavish (Hans Nielsen). Because Clark’s lazy, he has hired on ex-con diamond cutter Anthony (Dieter Eppler as Klaus Kinski) as pretend butler, so that everything needed for the illegal diamond trade is happening in house, or rather in castle.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end, and so Clark soon enough finds himself confronted with various problems, most of them connected to his dark past (so it’s all his own fault). First and foremost, a masked man who knows quite a lot about Clark’s past wants him to hand over the diamonds, and kills whoever gets in his way. That guy, let’s call him “The Strangler”, strangles his victims and then cuts an “M” into their foreheads before he decapitates them for extra fun and games. Then there’s the fact that Tavish, the shady lawyer Tromby (Richard Häussler) and barmaid Judy (Ingmar Zeisberg) – in varying configurations – would very much like to acquire some of Clark’s diamonds without having to pay for them. Oh, and did I mention Claridge’s colleague Mike (Hans Reiser) and Lord Blackwood are also acting quite suspiciously? Or that Anthony’s raving mad, wants to make sweet sweet love to the diamonds, and would prefer to make Clark rich by killing Claridge instead of seeing his boss sell his precioussss?

Fortunately for the blandly innocent Claridge, Scotland Yard sends its most wooden inspector, Jeff Mitchell (Harry “I’m so emotionless, I’m two pieces of wood” Riebauer) to romance her painfully somehow solve the strangler cases.

 
 
 

Der Würger is yet another of those non-Edgar Wallace krimis that are doing their best to emulate the successful formula of the Rialto movies; that’s certainly easier to do when you have, like krimi veteran director Harald Reinl does here, a Bryan Edgar Wallace novel to adapt. Edgar Wallace’s son did, after all, make a career out of emulating his father and selling his surname to the highest bidder (frequently German producer impresario Artur “Atze” Brauner, who is as close to one of the eccentric producer impresarios of the US and the UK as we Germans ever got), so the shoe fits perfectly well.

Of course, with the sort of movies I generally champion, keeping as close to a successful formula as possible is not necessarily a bad thing as long as one knows what to do with it. Reinl (and scriptwriters Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk, both men of excellent names, interesting filmographies, and a talent for writing absurdly confusing scripts) is as good at producing excellent, low budgeted entertainment out of a formula as one can be. Whenever I praise one of Reinl’s krimis, I mention his highly mobile camera, his talent for serial-like action sequences and the noir-like mood of the slower scenes (often also thanks to cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke), and these three elements are again what turn Der Würger into a pretty great time.

Sure, the action isn’t quite as good and frequent as in some of Reinl’s higher budgeted Rialto productions, but what is there of it is as exciting as action in German movies of this period (or, frankly, any period, for German director almost always just suck at this sort of thing) gets, showing off some nicely creative touches.

The art direction also isn’t quite up to the Rialto standards; fake Britain is not as playfully fake as it sometimes gets, nor does the film show quite the absurd imagination of its big predecessors. There’s your standard castle, there’s fog, there’s a boring bar, and for most of the film’s running time, that’s perfectly enough to put me in the not-Britain of the krimis.

 
 
 

The film’s other big flaw is clearly the acting. While German movies of this period always tend to the stiff and slightly melodramatic, most of the performances here are just the decided bit stiffer than usual (that might vary with the dubbed versions, of course); the performances aren’t horrible, they’re just not as good as the could be. There are two exceptions to that in the cast: Riebauer who plays exactly the same character Heinz Drache or Joachim Fuchsberger usually played lacks so heavily in charisma I have a hard time understanding why anybody would want to cast him as anything, not to speak of as the male lead, while Dietler Eppler may not be a Klaus Kinski, but sure as hell does his utmost to channel the great actor’s spirit by ranting, raving and making bug eyes at Karin Dor, something I do heartily approve of.

I also do approve of the production’s peculiar choice of soundtrack. The krimis always had a tendency to involve some of the better German film composers like Martin Böttcher and the godly Peter Thomas, but Der Würger goes one step further by (like a few other films did) employing the pioneer of electronic music Oskar Sala, co-inventor of the Trautonium and all-around eccentric musical genius. His weird, abstract electronic score probably isn’t what one would expect to hear in a piece of pulpy entertainment like this (some of Sala’s musical decisions seem somewhat perverse) but it’s often exactly what the film needs to feel more unique than it actually is. Sala’s music even turns what may be the most boring bar in the krimi genre into a place of weirdness and (slight) wonder.

Now, even though I’ve been pretty critical about nearly every part of the movie, I do like Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor quite a bit, even ignoring Sala’s and Eppler’s contributions. The film may not be quite up to the standards of the best of the Rialto Wallace krimis, but those films are as good as this genre gets; Der Würger may not be quite as excellent, yet it’s still an all-around fun film despite all of its flaws.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Die Farbe

March 16th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Huan Vu
2010 / Spharentor Filmproduktionen / 85′
 written by Huan Vu
from the story The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft
cinematography by Martin Kolbert
music by Tilman Seege
starring Ingo Heise, Michael Kausch, Marco Leibnitz, Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider

The 70s. The father (Patrick Pierce) of Arkham academic Jonathan Davis (Ingo Heise) disappears while retracing his own steps during and shortly after World War II in rural Swabia. Jonathan, deeply concerned, follows him, only armed with a pack of old photos.

At first, Jonathan seems to be completely out of luck. Nobody in the small village he traces his father to seems to have seen him, but at last one of the villagers, a certain Armin Pierske (Michael Kausch), recognizes the elder Davis not on the contemporary photo but at least from a thirty year old army picture.

Pierske tells Jonathan a weird story about how he met the elder Davis when he himself came home from the front, and tried to warn Davis and his men off of visiting a neighbouring farm for reasons Pierske then goes on to explain to Jonathan by way of flashing back to a time shortly before the War.

A meteorite crashed down on the farm of Pierske’s (in the flashbacks played by Marco Leibnitz) neighbours, the Gärteners (Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider, Leon Schröder, Philipp Jacobs, Jonas Zumdohme). The scientists coming to investigate were confused by the thing’s curious properties: meteorites don’t, after all, generally shrink over time, nor do they have properties strangely at odds with what we know about physics. Shortly before the meteorite could disappear forever during a lightning storm, the scientists found some sort of capsule inside of it, setting free an unearthly colour when trying to take a sample.

 
 
 

With no physical evidence at all anymore after the disappearance of the meteorite, the scientists left. However, strange things began to happen on the Gärteners’ farm. Fruit (and later some animals) started to grow freakishly large, but they also developed a taste that made them unsalable; the trees in the family’s orchard took on disquieting properties, moving when there wasn’t any wind to move them. And slowly, one by one, the family members began to change, growing unstable, mad, and ill through the agency of something not from this Earth.

Of course, the Gärtener’s farm is the one Jonathan’s father was visiting after the War; and it might just be that something he saw there has now called him back in one way or the other.

Huan Vu’s (whom you might know as the director of the Warhammer 40K fan film Damnatus that was killed by the angry lawyer brigades of Games Workshop) Die Farbe is a very fine adaptation of one of my favourite Lovecraft stories, the wonderful “The Colour Out of Space”. At first, I was rather sceptical concerning the story’s relocation from New England to Southern Germany, but for the most part, this change of location is to the film’s advantage. Sure, a viewer has to make a bit of an effort to accept the actors speaking English with clear (yet not very heavy) German accents in the film’s beginning as Americans, and then, once the film’s narrative has relocated to Germany, Ingo Heise’s Jonathan speaking German with a fake American accent, but the alternatives would surely have ruined what is after all an independent low budget production. Trying to pretend Germany is New England would have either robbed the film of its often impressive and mood building outside location shots, or threatened to make unintentionally funny what desperately needs to be earnest. A bit of accent trouble is much preferable.

This is especially the case because Vu uses the individuality of rural Swabia so well, giving the film the all-important sense of place that – as I can’t help but repeat again and again in write-ups – is one of the most effective ways for a low budget movie to gain a character all its own; competing with high budget films – European or American – on their own terrain generally means ignoring the advantages this kind of production has over them. Plus, the Swabian-Franconian Forest can be – filmed in the right way like it is here – an excellently creepy place, just the kind of locality where the intrusion of the Weird seems believable.

 
 
 

Die Farbe not only manages to evoke a place, but also specific times, through simple yet effective tools. Initially, I thought the three time levels were unnecessarily complicated, however, it soon became clear that the nested flashbacks really were the best way to tell Vu’s version of Lovecraft’s tale, and that – not a given in independent horror – Vu actually knows how to handle this sort of structure without the resulting film becoming tedious or needlessly confusing. It’s also nice to see a Lovecraft adaptation that does not feel the need to permanently include winks and nods towards the authors other works or shoehorn historical guest stars in for no other reason than to demonstrate that its writers know who Charles Fort was. There’s a guest appearance of the Danforth Memorial Library at the beginning, but that’s mostly that.

This admirable sense of restraint runs through the majority of the film’s writing. The movie prefers to underplay many of its dramatic and horrifying beats, all the better to be able to get its viewers with those it doesn’t underplay. It’s spiritually as close to Lovecraft’s writing in this particular story as possible, using those of the writer’s techniques that are applicable to film, and only changing the story’s framing instead of its major beats. The only part of the writing I’d criticize is the twist in the last act that doesn’t ruin the film, but also doesn’t do anything to improve it. As plot twists go, it isn’t horrible, it just seems a bit unnecessary.

On the visual side, Vu makes the interesting decision to film in black and white, except for the Colour itself, which is a clever and elegant way to get around the question of how one shows a colour that is indescribable – when the world is black and white, any colour will look Weird. For once, I also find it impossible to be annoyed by the use of CGI; in fact, CGI seems to me the right method to bring a living colour without a body as we understand it to life (such as it is). After all, a thing without body mass can’t suffer from the typical CGI problem of things looking like they have no body mass.

All these elements (plus some decent to good acting) add up to a piece of contemporary independent horror cinema I for once find easy to praise; I am, as it turns out, a sucker for films whose directors make one intelligent decision after the other and even improve on these decisions through thoughtful execution.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Der Frosch mit der Maske

September 9th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Face of the Frog
Year: 1959   Runtime: 87′  Director: Harald Reinl
Writers: Egon Eis, J. Joachim Bartsch  Cinematography: Ernst W. Kalinke
Music: Willy Mattes, Peter Thomas   Cast: Joachim Fuchsberger, Siegfried Lowitz,
Eva Anthes, Eddi Arent, Jochen Brockmann, Karl Lange, Walter Wilz

For over a year now, a (rather large) gang under the leadership of the mysterious masked villain only known as the Frog (played by himself, if we can believe the credits), has been terrorizing Britain with a series of robberies and break-ins, blackmail, and a bit of murder to make things more interesting, always leaving behind the mark of a frog at the places of their crimes. Why it’s so difficult to catch the members of a gang who is in the habit of branding its own with the sign of the Frog in a pretty visible place I don’t know.

On the case is Scotland Yard’s Inspector Elk (Siegfried Lowitz, who’d later go on to play a smug and rude cop in the long-running – and pretty damn boring – TV police procedural Der Alte, in popularity only second to Derrick), a man of a smugness and rudeness as great as his success at catching the Frog is small. But even the incompetent must get lucky some time, and Elk’s time comes when the Frog takes a carnal interest in a certain Ella Bennet (Eva Anthes). The villain’s idea of romance is a bit peculiar: suddenly appearing masked in a lady’s room at night and declaring that you’ll come again to take her with you another night, whether she wants to come or not is – I think – not what Miss Lonelyhearts recommends. I’m not sure what Miss Lonelyhearts says to blackmailing the lady of your heart by pulling her improbably naive brother (Walter Wilz) into a contrived murder affair, but that’s The Frog’s Way of Romance™, too. Whatever happened to roses and long walks in the park?

The Frog’s rather dubious handling of his romantic situation is good news for Elk, though, for it provides the inspector with ample opportunity to gather clues regarding the plans and identity of his enemy.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Elk’s not the only one the case. Cocky millionaire amateur detective (and nephew of Elk’s boss) Richard Gordon (Joachim “Blackie” Fuchsberger, some time before his career as a popular TV host, or as we Germans say, “Showmaster”) and his competent comic relief butler James (Eddi Arent) are inserting themselves into the investigation. Gordon’s pretty damn enthusiastic about his hobby, too, at least once he’s met Ella; he’s also a bit more competent at the whole romance thing than the Frog.

Now, our heroes will only have to find a traitor inside of Scotland Yard (don’t trust the thin ‘staches and eyebrows), investigate a dubious night club, survive captivity and wait until so many of the film’s human red herrings have been killed off that there’s only one guy left who can be the Frog.

  
  
  

Watching the very first of Rialto’s Edgar Wallace adaptations (this early in the proceedings still keeping comparatively close to Wallace’s novel), it’s becomes clear at once why the cinematic Wallace krimis took Germany by storm. Compared to just about anything else the country’s cinema put out at the time, Der Frosch is pure pop cinema: a bit lurid (as lurid as you could possibly be in Germany in 1959, really, which isn’t that lurid, but certainly also not coy), a bit silly, delightfully pulpy, taking itself not too seriously, yet not walking into the trap certain later Wallace movies would enter where a film takes itself so little seriously that it can be read as self-hatred or self-destructive. It’s not the sort of film you’d expect coming from German cinema at all, especially not in 1959 when pop cinema as an idea didn’t very much exist over here and pop culture itself had entered the slow, sad years between 1959 and 1961 when it looked as if pop itself had only been a fad.

Mainly responsible for the film’s energetic (and energizing) effect is Harald Reinl’s direction. Though they roughly belonged to the same generation of filmmakers who started out in the biz in the 1930s and were therefore pretty damn old for being “pop”, Reinl’s style is quite different from that of his Wallace adaptation colleague Alfred Vohrer – until now the only krimi director I’ve talked about here or over at my home base. Where Vohrer likes his acting melodramatic and his directing zooming in the direction of the surreal, Reinl seems to be going for an updated serial effect, using the much better technical and financial state of his production to achieve a feeling of dynamism and intensity atypical of the usual ponderous German movie. Reinl uses a lot of separate shots for every scene, loves snappy and tight editing and is no friend of scenes going on for too long. The editing is especially effective when it comes to the action scenes. As you probably know, neither the 50s nor Germany are usually praised for their action choreography, but (if you can ignore the minor fact that fists don’t actually seem to connect with faces in Wallace land) Reinl and his editor Margot Jahn manage to actually make the action sequences exciting through the cinematic wonders of clever framing and speedy cuts.

Reinl’s no slouch in the atmosphere department either. There are some fine examples of moody (studio) night shots to be found whenever appropriate, with some stylish uses of high contrast light and shadow play you can describe as noir-ish without having to stretch things too far.

Ironically, all that visual beauty comes from a director whose filmography shows him as a pure work for hire guy who spent his time directing whatever was thrown at him – Wallace krimis, Heimatfilme, unfunny comedies, Karl May adaptations, some Erich von Däniken “documentaries” or even (later in his career) a would-be Roger Corman Poe adaptation. Directors like Reinl never get a fair shot at being taken seriously outside of our cult movie specialist world, as if the qualities of a director were defined by the commercial situation he works in, and not by what we see on screen. This isn’t to say that parts of the director’s output aren’t pure and simple crap – because man, they sure are – it’s to say that we should probably not decide the worth of a life’s work by looking at someone’s worst films.

The Horror!? (not to be confused with The Edgar Wallace Mystery Hour) is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Der Todesrächer von Soho

August 26th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. The Corpse Packs His Bags
Year: 1972   Runtime: 76′  Director: Jess Franco
Writers: Jess Franco, Artur Brauner  Cinematography: Manuel Merino   Music: Rolf Kühn, Jess Franco
Cast: Horst Tappert, Fred Williams, Elisa Montés, Barbara Rütting, Luis Morris, Siegfried Schürenberg

A murderer with a very peculiar modus operandi haunts London. Concentrating on people visiting the fair city, he first packs his victims’ bags, then kills them with an incredibly precise knife throw.

Inspector Ruppert Redford (Fred Williams) – oh, the hilarity! – of Scotland Yard has quite a bit of trouble solving the case. I’m sure his trouble has nothing at all to do with him being a typical early 70s smartass playboy who just loves to let civilians do his job for him, like the (weirdly competent, obviously odious) comic relief photographer Andy Pickwick (Luis Morris) or his personal friend, the crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert).

To be fair to Redford, one has to admit that the case is rather complicated, seeing as it not only involves the strange murders, but also a shady doctor (Siegfried Schürenberg) with more than just one secret, his lovely assistant (Elisa Montés) with a secret of her own, a drug ring peddling a drug thrice as potent as heroin, various bombings, one or more revenge plots, and Barton’s secret. Not unlike Redford (who will solve his case by going where Pickwick tells him to, and being obnoxious), I lost track of the plot about halfway through the movie, and never was quite sure what was going on in some of the plot lines, so it’s difficult to blame him.

Say what you will about German producer impresario Artur “Atze” Brauner’s attempts at jumping on the successful Edgar Wallace adaptation wagon by making a contract with Wallace’s son Bryan Edgar Wallace that allowed him to use the younger Wallace’s name and the often very fine titles of the man’s books and make completely unrelated films out of them, but the man did show good taste when it came to the international co-operations late in his film cycle. After having co-produced Argento’s Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Brauner hired beloved auteur Jess Franco for his next Bryan Wallace movie, Brauner’s second version of Wallace’s Death Packs A Suitcase.

  
  
  

Now, I have gone on record saying that I generally prefer Franco’s more personal films – at least when we’re talking about his work of the 60s and 70s – to his attempts at making more conventional genre movies, but Der Todesrächer von Soho (which translates as “the death-avenger of Soho”, and no, the word “Todesrächer” does exist in German as little as “death-avenger” does in English – it’s just a lovely case of the sort of random composite noun the German language loves so dearly) turns out to be an exception to the rule, and may in fact be one of my personal favourites among Franco’s films. It’s probably because Franco might not have been allowed to indulge himself in his erotic obsessions as heavily is Franco fans are used to – well, beyond a very short nightclub sequence and a lot of women wearing boots, anyway – but does indulge heavily in his love of pulp and a visual and narrative style that have come down through the serials (on the visual side, of course combined with the man’s usual tics and enthusiasms).

While Der Todesrächer doesn’t work at all as a straight pulpy narrative (what with it having a plot so byzantine my first viewing didn’t even leave me with an understanding of the knife-thrower’s motives, even though I guessed his identity without much trouble with his first appearance on screen), it’s a virtual feast of classic pulp, serial, and krimi clichés as seen through the slightly skewed but loving perspective of Franco. The whole film is basically Franco shooting classic poses of the genres he’s working in from his favourite weird perspectives and through glass tables while a pretty hip soundtrack by Rolf Kühn (with some contributions by Franco himself) plays, pretty obviously having a lot of fun with it and for once not even trying to achieve transcendence through boredom. In fact (and genre-appropriate), Der Todesrächer is as fast-paced and sprightly as a Franco movie gets, with nary a minute where nothing exciting or at least interesting is happening on screen, making this one a Franco movie that’s much easier to appreciate than his more self-indulgent films. How could I not appreciate Franco having fun in this way?

As much as I love Franco, I usually do not use the word “exciting” to describe any of his films, but Der Todesrächer von Soho is an exception to that rule too, working as a timely reminder that Franco could be versatile if a given project interested him enough.

German viewers will probably have another reason to look fondly, or even with mild astonishment, at the film, for its use of Horst Tappert is quite an eye-opener. Here in Germany, Tappert is primarily known today as the star of the long-running (I thought about eighty years, Internet sources speak of only twenty-four) cop show Derrick. The show’s complete run of 281 episodes was written by Herbert Reinecker whom you also might know as the writer of Rialto Film’s Edgar Wallace cycle (and yes, Tappert was in some of those too, and quite lively at that). Unfortunately, Reinecker’s attempts at a more psychological crime show only resulted in a show as visually dead, emotionally and intellectually dull, and politically conservative as anything I’d care – or rather not care – to imagine, and drove Tappert to performances that would be cruel to call “wooden”, for even pieces of wood have feelings that can be hurt. Having grown up with Derrick, and somewhat forgotten Tappert’s part in the earlier Wallace movies, it came as a real shock to watch the actor here, about two years before he started on the show that was to make/end him, smiling, acting, even over-acting, and possessing an actual physical presence like, well, an actual human being, outplaying the film’s cops film character with effortless charisma. It’s quite a thing to behold, though not enough for me to ever want to revisit Derrick.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Die Blaue Hand

August 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: The Blue Hand / Creature With the Blue Hand / The Bloody Dead
Year: 1967    Runtime: 84′  Director: Alfred Vohrer
Writer: Herbert Reinecker  Cinematography: Ernst W. Kalinke   Music: Martin Böttcher
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Harald Leipnitz, Carl Lange, Diana Körner, Siegfried Schürenberg, Albert Bessler
(This write-up concerns the original German cut of the movie, and not that abomination some cruel American producer created out of it and random horrible inserts later on.)

Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski), descendant of a formerly rich family, is sentenced to a nice little holiday in the establishment of local shady psychiatrist (so untrustworthy he’s even wearing a monocle, for Cthulhu’s sake! in the 60s!) Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) for killing the family gardener.

Nobody cares much that Dave has insisted on his innocence in the murder throughout the trial, or that the evidence against him is pretty circumstantial, least of all his “loving” mother Lady Emerson (Ilse Steppat).

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The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

May 5th, 2010 | article by | 5 Comments »
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rating:
company: Six Entertainment
year: 2009
runtime: 90′
director: Tom Six
cast: Dieter Laser, Arthur C. Williams,
Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura,
Andreas Leupold, Peter Blankenstein
writer: Tom Six
cinematography: Goof de Koning
music: Patrick Savage
and Holeg Spies
out in limited release and
on demand from IFC Films

It’s safe to say that expectations for The Human Centipede (First Sequence), Dutch director Tom Six’s foray into gross-out surgical horror, have been set unreasonably high in advance of its US theatrical and On Demand release through IFC Films.  Its twisted premise has been described as disturbing, disgusting, controversial and just plain creepy, and understandably so.  I mean, who wouldn’t be grossed out by the sight of a trio of helpless people connected, end to end, to create one long ass-to-mouth digestive tract?  Well, me I guess.

That The Human Centipede has won numerous genre festival awards and received no end of accolades in the horror press is of little consequence, as once one pierces through the layers of obfuscating hype to see the film itself the sad truth of it becomes obvious.  This movie sucks ass.

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