"Feed her! Feed her!"

Of all my side projects going on this year, The Devil's Attic, The Louisville Zombie Walk, and the American presidential election, I'm pretty proud of this movie blog. I think I'm doing well for my first year as a film critic. 

Have I made mistakes? Sure. Sometimes I review sequels before the original movies. Usually it's because the first movie isn't streaming anywhere I can find it, but last November I got so excited that Netflix posted the final sequence of a certain trilogy that I just skipped over the first two. I guess I assumed if you were following this blog, you'd seen them already. 

Maybe you have. Maybe you haven't. Either way, I'd like to correct the oversight. This week's Thursday Thriller is The Human Centipede (First Sequence).

Whatever you may have heard, this 2009 work by Dutch filmmaker Tom Six is nothing more, nothing less than a traditional European folk story, a fairy tale of sorts.

Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams) and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) are two young, beautiful, American tourists on their way to a party and they get a flat tire somewhere in the German wilderness, which we all know was once a favored stomping ground of the Big Bad Wolf. After wandering around in the woods they find a house and they are momentarily so relieved you'd think the place was built out of candy. Instead of a witch inside, there's a mad surgeon named Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser), the world's foremost separator of conjoined twins to hear him tell it, and instead of eating the girls up, he wants to sew Lindsay's mouth to the butthole of Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura), another man he's kidnapped. Then he wants to sew Jenny's mouth to Lindsey's butthole to create one long digestive tract. Whatever the Katsuro eats, he then feeds the girl's behind him. Lindsay has to be in the middle for trying to escape. 

So it's pretty much exactly the same as Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. 

Although it has been thoroughly maligned by a solid consensus of film critics, I found The Human Centipede (First Sequence) to be a decent shocker, well worthy of its two sequels. It streams on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Shudder.