Dir: Tom Six , Netherlands , 2009, 92 mins, English/German/Japanese with some subtitles
Cast: Dieter Laser, Ashley C Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura
Review by Dave Hall
Word of mouth on this has been buzzing around cyberspace for months now, but if you’ve missed the hype, gather round. For this is the terrible tale of Dr Heiter, his laboratory, and his lifelong dream of splicing together the gastric systems (as the press notes primly put it) of three human victims. Bluntly, he intends to stitch them together, mouth to anus. What’s surprising is how much of a dull plod writer-director Six makes of his high concept horror idea; the sizzle is what matters here (100% medically accurate!), but the steak is very much underdone.
Two young American women (Williams, Yennie) travelling through Germany break down on their way to a remote nightclub, and seek shelter in the suspiciously squeaky clean house of Dr Josef Heiter (Laser). Before you can say look behind you, he’s drugged them, strapped them to medical gurneys, and kidnapped a young Japanese man Katsuro (Kitamura), all with the intention of creating the world’s first reverse engineered siamese triplets (complete with handy slide presentation for those not keeping up at the back). Will the two detectives investigating the disappearances put three and three together in time?
Frankenstein meets Hostel gives you an idea of where this film is coming from, but although conceived as grand guignol, it’s shot like a documentary on hobbies of the rich and deranged. Laser certainly looks the part of the mad scientist, but he would have been well-advised to revisit David Gale’s lugubrious turn in Re-animator for an idea of how to play this sort of thing; his comic timing is woeful. Meanwhile, his three victims are busily conforming to every Japo-American cultural stereotype going, at the same time embodying Six’s obvious target demographic. The result, bizarrely, is that the three hapless segments are almost preferable as a centipede: is it a stretch to imagine that having the ranting Katsuro as the headpiece is an affectionate nod to Japanese monster movies?
As one of the originators of Big Brother, Six is no stranger to creating Godlike figures operating in enclosed spaces using fellow humans as playthings. But his film shares the repetitiveness of the reality TV show, too; like the centipede, it has nowhere in particular to go and frequently grinds completely to a halt to shoehorn in some time-filling genre setpiece, like an inept escape attempt. On the evidence of this, Six is better at ideas than execution; his pacing is frequently off, and he seems to have no feel at all for horror, and not much more for comedy which is a problem when you look at his subject matter.
In reality this is a 20-minute short that grew extra legs with Six bolting bits on to his creation in the manner of his mittel European shock doc. Body horror doesn’t have a new king quite yet. As a nightmare vision, this is more David Attenborough than David Cronenberg.
