[NSFW] Would the movie "The Human Centipede" violate indecency laws?

I read a review of it and it sounds absolutely sick. Violates my indecency laws but I’m not sure I would censor it since there is not much I would censor. Very clear warnings are called for, however!

You do realize, that I now have to click on the link?

They really haven’t had any “decency laws” in long time. I’m not going to watch the click on the link though.

I wanna see this.

Thats going on my NetFlix list.

I’d have to see it to say how indecent it is. It is a gross concept either way.

@lillycoyote: Actually, there are official indecency laws on the books which is why everyone was up in arms when Janet Jackson’s nipple was on live TV and also why stations are fined hundreds of thousands of dollars if someone swear during prime time.

Like @janbb I also think that this shouldn’t be censored simply because I think most things shouldn’t be censored but I wonder if this movie does violate any laws.

@Adirondackwannabe: Be very careful. Like I said, I am still suppressing waves of nausea.

Take her warning seriously. UGH.On the other hand, I do have some really good ideas for my Christmas cards.

As creepy, disgusting, and wrong as this is, I really want to see it.

I wouldn’t think that it violates any laws, but then again..

@KatawaGrey Good point. In my opinion, I think it’s ridiculous that (only women’s) nipples are kept out of the public eye. In America, that is. I don’t think there is anything inappropriate or demeaning about them.

The Human Centipede

Why does that movie turn me on? ;-)

I’m very opposed to censorship on any level, just because who gets to decide what gets censored. I also realize we need to protect kids from inappropriate material, but again, who gets to decide what is inappropriate. I’m trying to come with what would be the redeeming qualities of this movie that would make it worthwhile viewing, and I’m not getting anywhere. It’s going to take some thinking to see what would make it not indecent.

@ChazMaz What doesn’t turn you on? :-)

@ChazMaz Thanks.I guess I’d vote for not indecent.

@chyna – Yea, what is with that. lol

“Decency” is relative to the country of production, and I’ll tell you as a fan of disturbing horror movies, Japan, Korea, and Germany are absolutely the most ruthless.

@Adirondackwannabe Saying it’s indecent and saying it should be censored are two different things. Without looking at it, I would guess that it should have an X rating, but that is not the same as not showing it at all.

OMG that was hard to watch. I don’t think I could watch the movie.

wanna watch the the clip, don’t wanna watch it

I could (potentially) see it as “indecency ” if it was an anal sex Centipede.

That not being the premise of the film.

@janbb Just watch it and get it over with.

Maybe it is ‘gross indecency” – the crime Oscar Wilde was accused of?

@chyna I have a very sensitive stomach!

I think that it’s interesting that someone just yesterday or the day before asked about social commentary in fiction, I can’t remember the exact wording of the question, but the reactions were varied, then in the review on the link I read this; ”...critical of the film’s lack of any form of social commentary, ...” So by this am I to understand that all films are supposed to have some sort of social commentary?
Interesting concept, but wouldn’t one get a cramp in ones tongue? I’m only speculating here…

According to a review I just read on IMDB:

“Thankfully, there’s nothing too graphic other than a few quick shots of “the surgery.” There’s not graphical depiction of “nature taking it’s course,” shall we say. I think it’s a good move – the thought of it all is enough, honestly. Considering the subject matter, I’d say it was presented as tastefully as it could be.”

@janbb I do too. It was really hard to watch. But I forced myself. No lunch for me today.

In the trailer, they don’t really show anything until the last 10 seconds.

It’s disturbing, yes, but, I do want to see it..

@chyna So you’re saying it would help me lose weight?

Reminds me of the movie Sssssss.

@janbb That’s what I’m going to use it for. I’ll go out and look at it everyday now.

@Seek_Kolinahr: thank you, I hadn’t read the reviews on IMDB. I was barely able to watch the trailer. This would most likely keep it off the legally indecent list but I am enjoying the conversation.

“When Katsuro [the front of the centipede] has to defecate, Lindsay is forced to swallow his excrement and the doctor watches with great delight.”

How is that not indecent?!?

Here’s the review from the New York Times if anyone wants to read it.

Makes me want to see the second one even less.

@KatawaGrey I should have been more specific. The FCC regulates television and radio, not motion pictures. This question is regarding a movie. But, I’m still wrong. :) I was checking out wikipedia on the so called Comstock Laws, the “indecency laws”, (see also Anthony Comstock) and the article says they are technically still on the books. But there are different legal standards, laws and regulations for TV and radio as opposed to movies.

@janbb I read the review. ”...the grotesque fusion at least silences the female leads, both of whose voices could strip paint.” That’s hilarious. I plan to see it and have an internal MST3K dialogue going on in my head. I can’t wait!

I’m not sure if it violates indecency laws, because the definition of indecency has a tendency to vary from person to person. However, I personally think that it is just another manifestation of someone’s twisted imagination.

Now if they had a mosquito bite on their hand. And, by scratching it would produce an orgasm. THAT would be indecent.

I guess it does have some redeeming value, if only to make us discuss standards and censorship, etc. That taste is going to be hard to get out of my mouth though.

@ChazMaz But so much more fun!

@Adirondackwannabe I suspect the discussion is much better than the film (and less “shitty”), but it’s true it does provoke controversy.

@janbb It makes you think about the issues, so I guess, for all the twisted mentality it took to come up with the idea, it has some value.

How did they decide who got to be first in line?

It sounds like as usual it was a man and the women just have to take his shit!

Yay for the Y chromosome.

who would voluntarily watch this?

A Myriapodologist would.

@ChazMaz LOL

Decency laws vary so much from country to country that it’s impossible to say, I’m sure in some countries it would and in others it wouldn’t. If we’re talking about the US, the First Amendment guarantees free speech unless it’s meant to incite violence. There are some indecency rules surrounding pornography which haven’t been fully resolved legally yet, but basically, since in any state you can still buy porn, it’s really not an issue even if it is “illegal” (some states still have laws against sodomy). The biggest distinction our government seems to make when it gets right down to it is the distinction between push and pull media. Push media is something that is pushed out to you like freely open broadcast TV and radio. Pull media is something you have to go get, like a website or a DVD. Generally the idea (though it’s sometimes twisted around by the FCC) is that anything considered “indecent” can’t be broadcast on public airwaves during hours when children are likely to accidentally stumble upon the content. The purpose is, you can watch whatever sick, twisted crap you want (as long as its production didn’t cause direct harm to someone, like in the case of child pornography), when it’s your choice, but when we’re blasting that information out to you, you lose some of that ability to choose what you see, if even momentarily (yes, you can turn the channel, but a 5 year old turning on the TV that happened to be set to the channel showing this movie would not exactly have a choice), so that’s where our government draws the line.

Personally, though I’m very adverse to corprophagic depictions, the movie does at least look scary in a way few horror movies are capable of delivering. I mean, we’ve all seen the captive trying to get away from death, but it kind of ups the ante when the cost of being caught equals your lips sewn to a stranger’s anus. I might actually see it and turn away from the grossest parts, just like I do when they show surgery (which is actually a good, beneficial thing unlike this) during something I’m watching. The most alarming thing to me is there is supposed to be a part 2 where he makes a chain of 12 people, and a part 3 which hasn’t been fully conceptualized yet.

Anyway, for me a movie is a movie, unlike 2 Girls, 1 Cup which is supposedly real, sure looked real, THAT I could not watch. On the other hand, anyone catch this past week’s Family Guy 150th episode. Stewie and Brian were locked in a bank vault and Stewie crapped himself. He convinced Brian to eat the crap out of the diaper and clean his ass with his tongue so he wouldn’t get a rash, and midway through, Stewie vomits, points to the pile and tells Brian, “there’s desert.” When Brian objects, Stewie says, “aw, c’mon, you like vomit.” Brian agrees that he does and eats that too! And to top it all off, Brian asks Stewie what he had for lunch, and Stewie says he had Jenny Craig, Italian Wedding Soup, “only 220 calories, but probably less for you.” Brian said it was actually pretty good. Now that is about as sick and twisted and disgusting as anything I can imagine, but yet, I laughed my ass off. I mean, it wasn’t real, it was a cartoon, it was playing on the fact that dogs do eat these kinds of things. But point is, if I can enjoy that, I think I could probably enjoy this movie, I just might have to turn away. You take it for what it is basically is my point.

And in the grand scheme of things, that’s how it should be, we should all get to choose whether we want to subject ourselves to this or not, but no one should have it thrust upon them.

Is this a comedy? Cause it’s stupid as fuck. Is this really what movie making has come to?

@deni

::raises hand::

Probably all the same people that would watch “Naked Blood” “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Horrors of Malformed Men”

@Seek_Kolinahr I LOVE CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST!!! one of my favorites but….mouth sewed to anus is….something else. lol.

Just reading about it is grossing me out.

I’d watch it.

You know it’s a good horror movie if it sparks controversy, such as it is.

Anyways I’m sure it’s nothing compared to all that Japanese slasher porn.

i could barely sit through the trailer. what shitty acting. i cant imagine an entire movie’s worth of this mumbo jumbo.

The biggest problem I have with it is plausibility. I’m serious. First off, what about e. coli? Wouldn’t the second and/or 3rd person in the chain be very susceptible to poisoning from the e. coli which lives naturally in the first person’s colon? Then what happens when your body gets poisoned like this? Well, don’t you vomit to try to get rid of it, but there would be no getting rid of it, it would just go right back down. If you can’t get vomit out of your mouth, can’t you asphyxiate? And that’s just assuming you were poisoned, most people would vomit if they had feces forced down their throats, at least until they got used to it. And isn’t feces basically the part of the food you consume that your body can’t use? So, person 1’s body gets all the nutrients, person 2 would become malnourished if all they could eat was the waste that another person’s body couldn’t use, right? And person 3, forget about it, even if enough nutrients remained in the feces to nourish a person who ate it, I can’t imagine there would be much of anything of sustenance left for person 3, they would die shortly. Not to mention dehydration….what are they going to drink. There’s only so much water in feces, certainly not enough to keep you hydrated, unless of course the person in position a drank so much water that they constantly had diarrhea, but that can be pretty acidic, I’d imagine it would burn out person 2’s esophagus. And of course what if one of the people in position 1 or 2 have bad hemorrhoids? You get those things and you need to keep that area really clean or you’ll end up with an infection. Person 1 or 2 could end up with sepsis or some other form of blood poisoning. What about flatulence? You force gas down someone’s throat it’s going to produce a burp, but when there’s no outlet for the burp, what happens then….you have to swallow all that air, that alone could make you really sick, you could even end up with an excessive amount of gas buildup in persons one or two that would rupture organs. And then there’s constipation, which can be really bad if you’re dehydrated, which as we’ve established person 2 would be (not to mention person 3). In fact, you don’t drink enough, when you finally go, you can have a bm that feels like giving birth, hard as a rock, thick enough to clog the toilet….if it can’t go down your plumbing, how the hell could you possibly swallow it? Person 1 eats a bit too much cheese and person 2 chokes to death? And what if you have a head cold and can’t breathe out of your nose, your mouth is clogged, do you suffocate? I can perhaps see it working, IF the premise is that they pull the top part of the esophagus out of the neck, and attach it to the colostomy of the person in front, and somehow create a bypass tube for the mouth so that water (and perhaps other food nutrients) can be swallowed and transferred to the digestive system. But that would seem to kill some (not all, but some) of the horrific aspects, I mean you wouldn’t actually have to eat it, just digest it in that scenario. And the whole point of this movie is supposedly to get audiences used to the idea so they can stomach the 2nd one….I don’t think it would work with 2 people, 3 would be even harder to achieve, but 12….I don’t think so.

Oy vey is mir!

@dalepetrie: I had all of the same thoughts you did when I first saw the trailer. Apparently the director consulted a surgeon to see if there was any way to make it viable and the surgeon said that if there were IV’s attached to person’s 2 and 3 supplying nutrients then it might work, assuming person 1 was fed the right diet to prevent excessive flatulence and other problems.

@KatawaGrey – well, I’m glad that work was done, I hope they incorporated that into the story. Might actually be a good horror movie. If I see it I’ll let y’all know what I thought.

“prevent excessive flatulence”

I want to know how the actors pulled it off.

I can see the production meeting. “you and you, will eventually have to motivate yourselves while being taped to the others ass.”

@dalepetrie Did you really think it that far through? You’re grafted to someone’s ass, what more can happen?

I question the use of the word “excessive” when it comes to flatulence. Considering the relative positions of the “farter” and…what would the other person be called? Fartee? Sniffee? .... anyway, how would one define excessive in this case? Because one would think that one fart would be excessive if one were the hindmost of the two. Just sayin’...

All farts are good farts.

@ChazMaz You and I could have such conversations!

@Trillian “Conversations” – Ha!

@janbb What are you trying to say? Didn’t I tell you to find some obscure reference material? Are you done? Fine, let me think. Reference for me, if you can, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow!

African or European? ;-)

God I was hoping someone would ask me that! See @janbb ?
European, of course. They’re not migratory, you know. We’ll worry about the coconut later.

“Swallow” in this context is downright disgusting!

@janbb if you’re going to be that intimate with someone, you know what I’m just gonna continue this in a PM!

@dalepetrie Your answer made me rofl. You did the same thing that I do when something is revolting, you anal-ize it. (pun intended lmao)

G/A

@MrsDufresne That was bad.
Why do we find this question so interesting?

Two words…

Hiney and face. The proximity to one another is intriguing.

Hmmm, going to make a movie. How do I pull it off? I want to bring an ass and a face together, without getting an X-rating.

@Adirondackwannabe will you please answer my pm

@Adirondackwannabe (I know, baaaaad ;D )

I think the reason why we find it interesting is because the grotesque tends to bring about different reactions in people, and it is intriguing to read those differences in the answers here.

I have been thinking about this movie today and something that really bothers me about this is that “human centipede” is a misnomer! A centipede is so named because it has a hundred legs so in order to make a true human centipede, twenty-five people would have to be attached.

Concentrating on semantics keeps my lunch down.~

I susupect they’re hoping for 24 sequels. It boggles the mind! I still haven’t watched the clip; which I had such will power when it came to food!

@janbb: I’m trying to think about it in a purely scientific context. and it’s working somewhat. The only problem is that now I’m thinking about seeing it and that’s definitely something I know I will regret.

Also, as gross as it is, what’s bothering me most is the idea that these people are alone with this crazy guy and that the two girls can’t even communicate with each other.

Edit to add: Just found this hilarious review online.

@KatawaGrey They could blow morse code messages back and forth to communicate.

Hehehehe. Pulsating globule of sleaze.

@Adirondackwannabe – That’s just how my mind works…I didn’t really anal-ise it (thx @MrsDufresne), as much as all this stuff just kind of hit me as I was watching the trailer….I keep saying, well what about this, what about that, no no, that would never work….it is hard to be in my head sometimes I will admit.

@dalepetrie Understood. Also a member of the mind works in strange way club. Not as bad as K’s, that gave us this gem, but close.

@Adirondackwannabe: Hey now, my mind ain’t bad. I thought it was going to be an old style monster movie a la Godzilla and Mothra. :P

@KatawaGrey :) I know.