Fantastic Fest, the genre film festival held annually in Austin, Texas (primarily at a Flavorwire favorite, the Alamo Drafthouse), kicked off last Thursday night, with one of this year’s most notorious entries running right off the bat: The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), the clamored-for-by-no-one follow-up to the 2010 geek show (and South Park target) The Human Centipede. That film portrayed, in graphic detail, the “100% medically accurate!” (uh huh) story of a mad scientist obsessed with, um, unorthodox surgery. (I’ll just accept my “understatement of the year” award now, thanks.) The sequel is the tale of a loathsome mental case obsessed with the first film (meta!), though, by all reports, its “story” is primarily a clothesline upon which to hang writer/director/sociopath Tom Six’s depravity.

Reviews, even among the open-minded Fantastic Fest crowd, were not kind. FEARnet’s Scott Weinberg called it “one of the most overtly, oppressively, and depressingly puerile experiences you’ll ever have with a movie,” and wrote that the film “is more than content to be the indie horror flick version of a low-rent carnival sideshow: at first you want to see how much ugliness you can take, but eventually it all becomes too base, too grueling, and too miserable.” (For his part, Movies.com’s Eric D. Snider ingeniously penned “A Proper Gentleman from 19th Century England Reacts to Seeing Human Centipede 2” — ya know, “I fear’d lest the gentlewomen in attendance should faint dead away from the shock of it!”). Weinberg raises an interesting point, and — truth be told — about the only credible explanation for the first film’s success (or at least, success enough to warrant a sequel): the presence of that “carnival sideshow” element in modern genre cinema, pushing moviegoers to ask themselves how much they’re willing to watch. … Read More