The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009) on Netflix
Lindsay and Jenny, American tourists in Germany, get a flat tire and seek help at a villa. The owner, Josef Heiter, is a retired surgeon who once separated conjoined twins.
- Netflix2.4/5
- IMDb4.4/1098,518 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes47%
Trailer
Plot summary
Josef Heiter is a retired surgeon who was once a leading expert at separating conjoined twins, and he now wants to build new creatures by joining living things instead. In the basement of his villa he keeps a makeshift medical ward. Two friends from New York City, Lindsay and Jenny, are on vacation in Europe when their car breaks down in Germany. They come to his door for help, and he drugs them. They wake tied on gurneys in his basement. Heiter has also taken a Japanese tourist, Katsuro. He wants the three of them connected in a line, each mouth to the anus of the person ahead, sharing one digestive tract.
Cast
- Bernd Kostrauas Dirty Man in Car
- Rene de Witas Truck Driver
- Sylvia Zidekas Hotel Receptionist (voice)
- Mauricio d'Oreyas TV Presenter (voice) (as Maurício d'Orey)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Tom Six has said the whole concept began as a joke he made to friends about punishing a child molester by stitching his mouth to the anus of an overweight truck driver.
- Six deliberately hid the film's real premise from the people financing it, worried the mouth-to-anus concept would scare off backers; the financiers reportedly did not learn what the film actually was until it was finished.
- The villain's name was an amalgamation of Nazi war criminals: the surname Heiter, which means cheerful in German, combines the names of Nazi doctors Fetter and Richter, while the first name comes from Josef Mengele, who experimented on prisoners at Auschwitz.
- Laser stayed in character as Heiter for the whole shoot, often shouting at the rest of the cast, keeping away from the other actors and crew between scenes, and eating only food he had brought onto the set himself, mostly fruit.
- During filming Laser accidentally kicked his co-star Kitamura, who played Katsuro, and the mishap led to a fight on the set between the two actors.
- Six consulted a surgeon about the film, and the surgeon initially wanted nothing to do with it, feeling Six was crazy and the idea had nothing to do with medical science, before changing his mind and working out a method for creating a human centipede.
- Many of the film's grotesque sound effects were made by manipulating raw meat, including the sound of a nose breaking, which was created by snapping bones inside cuts of meat.
- According to Six, the jacket that Heiter wears, which Laser bought himself, was a genuine jacket once worn by real Nazi doctors.
