Three for Three
The coming months are set to see the release of many new films: some bad, some good and some you just can’t quite categorise. Initial impressions really do count in the film industry so obviously your trailer has to have an impact. Whether this impact is what you aim for however, is a completely different matter.
Let us look at an upcoming film that did just this. The Human Centipede is set to be released nationwide on May 7th and after viewing several trailers (to avoid intial bias because I try to be open minded) my impressions of the film did not change in the slightest. The film appears to begin in a typical American horror film style: two girls, one car and a predictable break down during a road trip across Germany. The girls then trek through the rain and find a house home to a creey German surgeon. It turns out he is a renowned specalist in the separtation of Siamese twins, but he is now more concerned with joining people together. After discovering a man tied up in the basement the girls soon realise the surgeon is not all he appears to be.
Just the inital introduction to the concept of attaching three people together is enough to boggle the mind, but to then actually be shown a method that is “100% Medically accurate”, as the film poster boasts, is unnerving. The concept, in all fairness, is not what bothers me. Make of that what you will. What bothers me is that, as a film, it does not look like anything particularly spectactular. The only reason for the hype on the internet for this mediocre garbage is that is caters for society’s morbid fasination with anything grotesque. Putting aside the controversy of the story for a moment, taking a step back to look at the mis en scene, acting and camera work is nothing overly brilliant. As someone who studies film on a regular basis I believe it was a poor choice to show the resulting human centipede. Instead this is the kind of concept that would work better to leave it up to the audience’s imagination: to only show parts or hints at the three people sown up end to end.
The success of the film will depend on how well it can draw in an audience hungry to satisfy their curiosity. Categorised as a horror film it will need to be unique enough to make a lasting impression. After reading very mixed reviews from film critics and discovering it has recieved a 7.1 / 10 on IMDB, this is one film that may surprise us. What kind of surprise, however, is yet to be decided.
