Too Many Movies: Dolph Lundgren's Hand Is Reaching Out For Yours

This week, Joe McCulloch handles The Expendables, Tim O'Neil brings you The Human Centipede, and there's a bit from Tucker on Centurion. Later in the week, there's going to be a 70's genre meltdown.

Oh, were you looking for a Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World review? Joe handled it a few weeks back, you can see it right here. 

The Expendables
Staying Alive, 2010
Joe McCulloch

The back of my head tells me the key moment of this improbable $80 million+ tribute to chest-beating action-combat programmers of yore comes when Eric Roberts -- playing a CIA rogue/would-be drug lord so slicked back rich-nasty he stops just short of lighting cigarettes with $100 bills -- bursts into a local dissident’s home, gazes at her paintings and exclaims THIS IS HOW IT STARTS! Art to change the world, eh? I wouldn’t call this latest Sylvester Stallone joint a political picture up front, but it carries with it a similar connotation as the old Golan-Globus epics it emulates - but while Missing in Action let us finish the job in Vietnam before even Rambo got back, The Expendables sees a bruised, soul-crushed America rising up to rediscover the idealism in liberating distant lands from… prior American abuses. Cue the CIA stooge, laughing and sipping tea at a waterboarding! Only through the intercession of a hot-blooded señorita and a teary-eyed flashback to war-torn Bosnia delivered by Academy Award nominee Mickey Rourke can Sgt. Sly find the will to lead his howlin’ mercs into the preservation of freedom on foreign shores.

Needless to say there’s plenty of explosions -- seriously, there’s a lot of shit blowing up in this, it’s like slow pans in Tarkovsky -- and the occasional smirk from an overstuffed cast fooling around; it really helps if the thought of “Stunning” Steve Austin barking ¡ándale! at red beret henchmen brings a smile (and this may be the most wrestler-heavy Stallone picture since Paradise Alley). Many other men-of-action pop up, none of them better than Dolph Lundgren, who’s admittedly alone among the main cast in filling a role not steeped in some variation on an established persona; as the dope-addled loose cannon of the team, scarred and scraggly-haired Lundgren lurches around the screen, slurring thick-accented tough guy lines with a grimaced zeal evoking Klaus Kinski perpetually in conversation with Mean Gene Okerlund. Nobody else is quite as fun as that, although reliable Terry Crews brings his particular style to a nothing role, at one point out-acting Randy Couture by merely raising an eyebrow.

Unfortunately, there’s just too many performers in here and not enough space. Jason Statham headlines a romantic subplot for the sole purpose of eventually beating the shit out of an entire basketball court full of suburban jocks (his lady love vanishes from the screen thereafter), which isn’t too bad, but the seams really show when Jet Li unexpectedly hops into Sly’s truck for a highway chase that sees the aging martial arts legend sit in the back and fire a gun for close to a reel. Worse, the action scenes are of variable quality, ranging from a fine Statham-Li showdown with Gary Daniels -- aka Kenshiro from the live-action Fist of the North Star movie -- to an absolute mess of under-lit, undercranked hand-to-hand outdoor fighting; if this is a valediction for an older style of action filmmaking, it didn’t have to include the occasional breakdown in genre mechanics! But then, easygoing Stallone isn’t much for farewell grandeur; his team’s private surge kills the bad people, and at times just remains alive as the not-really-so-bad people kill each other, the whole effort being for them and all, and after that he ensures the good local girl that he’ll always be there. Yes America - you’ll be back.

Centurion
I'll Take Things That Are Still Better Than Doomsday, For 10 Dollars, 2010
Tucker Stone

Although the line "this is neither the end, nor the beginning, of my story" sounds kind of cool when its coming out of Michael Fassbender's takes-the-skin-off-chicken pectoral regions, it's also kind of silly. Okay, so it's the middle of your story. And the movie is going to be about you getting to this point, this shirtless, uphill mountain hands-bound run, and that's why we're starting here.

Then you wait about fifteen minutes, meet the other characters, we flash back to Michael Fassbender being captured because he can speak Bad Guy Language and before 20 minutes hit the clock, we've ended up right at the the scene that opens the movie. So it didn't really mean anything, and was just kind of put there so that the movie could start with Our Hero, in a tough, shirtless situation?

Well, rest assured (or prepare for disappointment): Centurion is not pulling at the same sort of wall-to-wall abdominal walls of man-porn that was 300. Yes, you'll get to see what Fassbender and discipline can produce, but no, it doesn't look like Officer McNulty has been hitting the gym since The Wire concluded. For the most part, this is more a modern war movie than it is a swords and sandals picture--a small team, behind enemy lines, trying to make it home alive. Get ready for lots and lots of running, a team of seven slowly dwindling to nothing, a stab-you-in-the-ankle traitor, and a whole lot of brothers-in-arms gut-roaring loyalty. Hell, there's even a witch/princess with a cute little house made out of trees and sticks!

Maybe its the forces of cheap, unstoppable power that's currently lurking in the heart of New York's most unlikely genre treasure chest, but Centurion comes across as a great B-movie foolishly posturing as an A-level entertainment. It's not bad, a compulsively watchable men-bashing-men aggression piece with a twisted, revenge addicted female in the Darth Vader role, but there's an unnecessary seriousness to which the story is told, a flaw that comes crashing to the foreground when one of the nice guys (choke!) bites it due to sheer accident in the film's false epilogue. Don't pretend you've earned our tears, Centurion. It's your chests, double-pierced by a single wooden spear, that made us squeal. If you'd stuck to that, you'd have been just fine.

The Human Centipede
What The Fuck, No, Seriously, What The Fuck?, 2010
Tim O'Neil

I'm not what you'd call an aficionado of horror films. Don't get me wrong, I like well-made horror films, I'm not adverse to the genre. But I'm also not someone who pays that much attention to the genre. Most horror films I see these days are neither good enough nor bad enough to be truly enjoyable, and as a result most of the time I don't even bother. Therefore, if you're looking for a review of The Human Centipede steeped in contemporary horror cinema theory and nerd trivia, I am not the man for that job. I am just a human being, writing on my little keyboard, trying in some small way to make sense of the extremely senseless film that I have just inflicted upon myself. 

The reason I watched this film was simple: I read a couple reviews that said the film was flat-out one of the most bizarre things ever put on film. Seriously, here's a direct quote from Roger Ebert:

I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.

If you're like me, that's the kind of sui generis come-on that poses a serious challenge to the conscientious filmgoer. I like weird, and I especially like weird horror. If i had a favorite genre of horror, it'd probably be "weird horror." One of the other reasons I don't watch as much horror films as some is that most horror really isn't very weird. Hellraiser 2? That's a weird-ass movie that still haunts my nightmares some twenty years after the fact. That movie had some painfully bizarre things to say about sex, death, sex, pain, sex, obsession, did I mention sex? Really, most slasher films or creature features aren't that interesting if they're just about a dude with a knife or a monster with big teeth: where's the existential challenge there? Everybody dies, some people die more painfully than others, yawn. Sometimes the scariest horror movies are those sleazy direct-to-DVD serial killer biopics, because those guys? Bundy, Gacy, Gain, Fish - those guys were real and their existence poses serious, disturbing questions to those of us unfortunate to live in the same world as the one that spawned those monsters. That's real horror, and if you're going to scare me you've got to offer me something more than just blood and guts.
You know what the most horrifying movie of the last fifty years actually is? Judgment at Nuremberg. I'm dead serious: it's square as the day is long, a damn Spencer Tracy melodrama of a kind that was already passe in 1961 - and yet, at the end of the day, you're still left with a portrait of a world wherein even as stalwart and handsome a fellow as Burt Lancaster could passively slide into complicity with grand evil. That's something that you don't shake, because there's no waking up from that nightmare. Oskar Schindler can't save humanity from its worst impulses, those impulses are there and they're ineradicable and irreducible. So: horror filmmakers of the world, go hard or go home. There are a lot of things scarier than a dude with a knife or a zombie trying to eat your brains. Use your imaginations. At least give me something that hits me where it hurts. 

All of which is, I guess, my way of moving around the subject at hand, the dreadful spectacle of The Human Centipede. This is a film that sticks in your head - I can honestly say I haven't thought more about a film in a long time. But that's no endorsement: it sticks in your memory not because it's particularly effective or spectacularly horrific, but because it's so very monstrously cruel. I guess the point of that long preamble is that since I've seen the film I've been trying to categorize exactly what it is I saw - was it a slasher film? Some kind of torture porn thing? Or something deeper, some meditation on inherent cruelty and sadism? Some kind of exploration of the inner realms of the human psyche and man's great capacity to inflict suffering on others? I suspect the people who made the film truly believed it was the latter, but its primary appeal to genre fans probably lies more along the lines of the former - that is, it certainly presents a novel and unnerving method of sadistic torture. But you find yourself asking, what's the point? The whole thing is profoundly flawed because it presents one of the single most disturbing images in the history of cinema for no real reason other than because it can.
There's no point to any of it, it's useless, empty grand guignol. But then, it can't even fall back on the animal pleasures of passionate sensationalism of the type you might historically associate with grand guignol - it's bloodless, both figuratively and literally. For a movie built on such a gruesome premise, it is almost entirely gore-free, with only a handful of blood-and-guts money shots peppered throughout. But more importantly, it's sterile. If there was some kind of humanity on display you might find some kind of thematic purchase, some kind of connection between the putrid humiliation on screen and bigger ideas of cruelty and sadomasochism. But there is none, and I defy anyone watching this film to detect any real tone other than bleak deadpan. It almost seems like a satire, but a satire of what? There's no "there" there, and ultimately you find yourself spinning your wheels because you've just devoted an hour and a half of your life to a film about a German mad scientist who sews three people together ass-to-mouth and tries to turn them into a grotesque companion animal. 

Am I giving this movie too much credit? I suspect I am. I don't want to give the mistaken impression that this is in any way a "good" film, despite what I can only in all seriousness call a profound ontological abyss at its heart that defies any rational explication. Perhaps it would be better to bring in a comparison to another film I recently saw for the very first time, Tommy WIseau's masterpiece of domestic madness, The Room. (Maybe I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but give me a break, I'm taking my trash cinema cues from Harper's.) The Room is an awful movie on every level but still deeply enjoyable. It's fairly obvious from the first frame that WIseau knows less than nothing about making a film - probably knows less about cinema than your average teenage Michael Bay fan - and yet he has nevertheless made a film. It's a bad film but - if this makes a difference? - it's keenly felt. It's so emotionally naive and frankly unguarded in its dramatic simplicity that it can't help but be endearing. The Human Centipede is, like The Room, an awful film, but it's awful in an entirely different way. The Human Centipede was made by a man, Tom Six, who clearly knows a great deal about cinema. He is not perhaps the most imaginative director but he nevertheless knows how to frame a shot, how to build tone through composition. I am betting he's got a thick dog-eared Moleskine filled with crib notes from Kubrick. But why, for what purpose? The film is alienating and sterile without any respite or context.
Have you seen David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers? I'm not a Cronenberg fan - I actually think VIdeodrome is kind of lame, so if that's a deal-breaker you can stop reading without any pangs of regret - and I don't think Dead Ringers is very good either. It's kind of obvious and, really, kind of silly where it should be scary. The problem is that it doesn't go far enough in its commitment to body horror. The body is a truly frightening thing, and Cronenberg is certainly onto something when he posits that there are indeed worse things than death, and those things involve ritual mutilation and involuntary transformation (his remake of The Fly is pretty great because, for a Jeff Goldblum vehicle, it grapples with these ideas rather fearlessly). I think a movie with two Jeremy Irons running an inept gaslight on Geneviève Bujold is not, perhaps, the best vehicle for these ideas, and sure enough Dead Ringers dissolves into unwitting comedy at the precise moment it really needs to soar into perversion. The Human Centipede tries to pick up the slack from the moment Dead Ringers drops the ball (mixed metaphor alert, if you're following at home), but whereas it certainly has the follow-through when it comes to disturbing physical horror, it totally lacks even the elementary insight into human emotion that Cronenberg brought to his film. By which I mean: Dead Ringers was really about sex. The urge to punish the body, to tear the body, to manipulate the body - it's a sexual desire born of adolescent self-loathing and given form by adult fetishists. When Clive Barker directed Hellraiser and pulled the fearsome Cenobites off the pages of The Hellbound Heart and onto the screen, his leather-clad monsters were horrific precisely because they represented an unnerving collision of the unrestrained sexual id and the penurious superego. The only thing stronger than the sexual urge is the urge to repress, and therein lies the frisson at the heart of human sexuality in all its myriad glory. For humans, sex is deeply entwined with pain and punishment, and this formula has held true since long before Dr. Freud dropped some science on an unsuspecting Vienna. 

So what's the problem with The Human Centipede, then? There's no sex anywhere! The film's mad scientist is the most scrupulously asexual mad scientist I can ever remember seeing portrayed on film. The only hint of sex that comes at any point throughout the movie is early on, when the two American tourists who later become the second and third segments of the titular centipede monster are ogled by a repulsive German man in the middle of the woods. And then, from that moment on, these two girls cease to exist as sexual objects: whereas you might expect any horror film that revolved around the ritual mutilation of two comely young women to focus on the more prurient elements of this scenario, that's not Six's game. His mad scientist has no interest whatsoever in other human beings as sexual beings. They're animals, just like the unfortunate rottweilers who served as the test cases for the good doctor's first experiment in animal conjoining. You almost get the feeling that any kind of perverted sex angle would have made the movie better - or at least more watchable - by giving the doctor some kind of recognizable human emotion. As it is, he's a blank slate: a retired surgeon who once specialized in separating conjoined twins, and who now has devoted himself to, um, artificially conjoining people. For what purpose? Basically, because he can: he wants to train the human centipede to retrieve his daily newspaper and to heel alongside his shiny German boots. We're given the fetish objects but no actual fetishization: the German mad scientist is painted with the same broad strokes as any generic Nazi mad scientist, a kind of latter-day Mengele. But any allusion to this kind of real horror is purely conjectural on the part of the audience. The doctor has no life, no interior, outside the most basic understanding that he is a retired doctor who wants to push the limits of medical science, who gets off on hanging blown-up prints of conjoined fetuses on his wall. Otherwise his motivations appear almost comically infantile: he likes the idea of sewing someone's mouth to another person's ass and forcing them to subsist on the ingestion of shit. One of the most demented scenes in this deeply demented movie occurs when the lead centipede segment, who has been trying his best to resist the urge to defecate, finally has no other option than to let go and empty his bowels into the mouth of the woman behind him. it's demeaning not merely for the characters in the movie but for the actors and actresses involved, and ultimately for the audience as well. It's Two Girls One Cup with pretensions of grandeur.
Because the movie hews so closely to its comparatively naturalistic milieu - no flights of voyeuristic fancy, no fantasy elements - the viewer's mind is left to linger on holes which maybe would not have loomed so large had the film itself not been such a baffling mess. To put it bluntly, viewers forgive good movies every logical stretch and storytelling inconsistency. What's the point of asking Brian DePalma why he pays so little attention to logic and naturalism at certain junctures? Either you like DePalma's films and give yourself over to the particular magic realism of Tony Montana's imperviousness to bullet holes, or you don't like Scarface and feel inclined to pick it to pieces because the filmmaker doesn't play straight Hoyle's Rules with the audience. I think a film like The Human Centipede falls on the sword of its own particular obeisance to reality, and I am wary of meeting the individual so swept up by the cinematic magic of Tom Six's vision that he willfully overlooks just how slipshod the construction actually is. By sticking so meticulously to legible reality in some instances but not all, it draws glaring attention to those parts of the movie that fall short. Because it's so doggedly antiseptic - in a way that aggressively resists any kind of symbolic or metaphorical reading - the viewer finds himself asking questions like: if the doctor knows that the segments of his centipede are going to die of massive infections and plans accordingly by pumping them full of antibiotics, then why isn't he more careful intubating the people for the massive operation? If the girls strapped to the hospital beds actually can free themselves from their restraints with their teeth in a matter of just a few seconds, why don't they figure this out until literally the last moment possible to do so? Are German cops so stupid that they need to get a search warrant to investigate someone's property when said someone has just made violent threats with a syringe filled with mysterious fluid? (I know things are different across the pond, but where I come from that's called "probable cause.") Why do German police only travel in twos, even when they're executing a search warrant on the property of a violent suspect in a number of mysterious disappearances? Is it because if there were more than two police officers at the movie's climax, then it wouldn't really be very a very dramatic climax at all? Ad infinitum.

Ultimately we're left with an awful movie that nonetheless manages to be considerably thought-provoking - but the particular thoughts being provoked are probably not the same thoughts the filmmakers intended to provoke. The first question that springs to mind is, why was this movie made? As the film plays you have to ask yourself, why does this mad scientist want to create the human centipede? After the film has finished, you must then ask yourself, why did Mr. Six want to create The Human Centipede? I don't know, but I kind of wish he hadn't. I sincerely hope that anyone who reads this review doesn't feel compelled to go and track the movie down: after all this, I really wish I hadn't. It wasn't worth it to have these images burnt into my brain until the day I die, images of callous cruelty and demeaning sadism, conjured up for no justifiable reason in the whole wide world. Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen. Ever.

-Joe McCulloch, Tim O'Neil, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Chris Jones]

Tim, have you ever read any manga by Shintaro Kago? It's interesting in that it's largely gore/mutilation porn(and I don't mean that in the cinematic sense, the comics are LITERALLY pornography much of the time), but it's generally not meant to be taken as "erotica" per se and he always manages to slip in some aspect of satire or philosophy or psychology that makes it so that it doesn't seem like you totally wasted your time, and in fact justifies much of the more heinous gore and sexual aspects of the comics.

I guess what I'm saying is, Kago's comics are some of the most upsetting things I've ever seen and even they can muster some kind of point, have some kind of value. The fact that there can be something as upsetting that lacks any worth for the audience is pretty disturbing but, more than that I think, depressing. Thanks for this review-I'll not be watching The Human Centipede.

[Abhay]

I so enjoyed the Expendables. It really far exceeded my (extremely low) expectations for it. I just really enjoy that kind of action-- and it was just better action than I expected. Dolph Lundgren-- I'd be a little sad if there wasn't a Lundgren Resurgence in this country after that movie. It's too bad about the characters-- Terry Crews's Greatest Gun Ever should have gotten higher billing than Randy Couture, and the secondary bad guy really needed to be Danny Trejo instead of that one guy.

But I really enjoyed Mickey Rourke's deranged babbling, as much for Rourke's rambling as for the expression on Stallone's face while he was doing it.

What a fun movie to see with an appreciative audience who understands what they purchased a ticket for, though. Just a crowd-pleaser.

[mateo]

The Expendables looks, to me, like it is sorely lacking in Arnold Schwarzenegger. That would have been a get.

Tim- That is a wholly great piece of writing on a film I have zero desire to see. Enjoyed that immensely.

[Amy Lopp]

Do not read a review of The Human Centipede while eating lunch. You may lose your very overpriced chicken salad sandwich from Whole Foods.

[Jog]

mateo - I read somewhere online that Arnold Schwarzenegger's entrance mirrors the first shot of the hot-blooded local girl/quasi-love interest. If true, that would be the wittiest thing in the movie by about 10,000%.

(And yeah, at least half of Schwarzenegger's screentime is in the trailer...)

[mateo]

I wrote an essay in seventh or eighth grade (around the time that Arnold was the fitness guru for Bush the elder) speculating that Arnold should run for Governor of my then home-state of California.
My evidence? :

Twins (the bomb),
Predator (the bomb),
Terminator 1 and 2 (two had just come out- the BOMB),
Total Recall (the BOB-OMB),
Conan (the bomb) and for some reason-
the fact that he was Mr. Universe, a fact that impresses the adult me not at all. Maybe I thought that since he had already commanded a universe, a state would present little challenge.

This is not bullshit, my ma has it on her fridge in all of its half-cursive/half-print glory to use as a conversation starter whenever she brings home a new cat.

[Nick]

Thank you for removing the pictures from Human Centipede. I was having a hard time unseeing those images (shudder).

[Terry B.]

I to have been visually and mentally violated and scarred by this pointless, pathetic and cruel piece of cinematic bastardry. I blame my own morbid curiosity and my hopes for something interesting. I will watch a bad horror movie because they can still be entertaining, but like an earwig, this thing is stuck in my brain and I fear I may never get it out of my head. I cannot imagine what in the hell possessed someone to write this movie, let alone produce it or God forbid ACT in it. This is not something I would want on my cred sheet no matter how badly I wanted to be an actor. Even more I can't imagine what possessed me to continue watching once I realized what was going to happen. I guess I thought it woudl get better....