Joe Dallesandro and Jane Birkin in Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus / I Love You, No I Don’t.
According to the “censor watchgroup” site melonfarmers.com, Tom Six’s The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) joins a number of other motion pictures banned in the last few years by the concerned folks at the British Board of Film Classification.
Among those are several porn/sexually explicit titles (gay rape porn Lost in the Hood, Rob Rotten’s The Texas Vibrator Massacre), Nick Palumbo’s Murder Set Pieces, and Koji Shiraishi’s Grotesque.
Here are a few other titles that in decades past the BBFC board decided would harm the psyches of British denizens, young and old:
- 99 Women (1969) – Prison drama featuring Oscar winner and The Exorcist‘s demon-voice provider Mercedes McCambridge as a torture-loving prison warden.
- “The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival” (1974) – A collection of five prize-winning short films, including Eyetoon and The Stripper.
- Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) – Biker drama directed by future Oscar nominee Richard Rush, and starring a pre-Easy Rider Jack Nicholson.
- Je t’aime moi non plus / I Love You, No I Don’t (1976) – Serge Gainsbourg’s post-Sunday, Bloody Sunday bisexual triangle featuring Joe Dallesandro, Hugues Quester and Jane Birkin.
- Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) – Dyanne Thorne has the title role, Ilsa, warden of a Nazi death camp in which lots of naked women get tortured. Don Edmonds directed.
Other titles include Panic in Needle Park (1970), starring Al Pacino; Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s Quiet Days in Clichy (1970), based on a novel by Arthur Miller; Claude Mulot’s Le sexe qui parle / Pussy Talks (1975), in which Penelope Lamour discovers that her vagina has developed a(n) (audible) voice; and, inevitably, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O (1975).
Also, Sergio Martino’s excellent The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, whose classification was revised in 2001, when it was “passed 18 uncut.”
And finally, in 2002 the British Board of Film Classification ordered more than three minutes cut from Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, which features graphic scenes of “extreme sexual violence.” That represented the BBFC’s biggest demand for an “editing job” in about a decade.
Described by its distributor, Medusa Pictures, as an “ultra-controversial piece of manga mayhem,” Ichi the Killer is based on Hideo Yamamoto’s manga about a bloodthirsty hitman who meets his match in the person of Ichi, a man with razor blades in place of toes.
Ichi the Killer offers scenes of naked women being sexually mutilated, beaten, and killed, which “appear to the [BBFC] board to have no function other than the pleasure of the onlooker.” When Miike’s film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, organizers provided sick bags to the audience.
Tom Six.
Tom Six vs. ‘Human Centipede 2’ British Ban
Empire has published Dutch-born filmmaker Tom Six’s response to the British Board of Film Classification’s ban on The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) in the United Kingdom. Empire explains that “the censoring of the F-word, ironically, is Six’s.” See below:
Thank you BBFC for putting spoilers of my movie on your website and thank you for banning my film in this exceptional way. Apparently I made an horrific horror-film, but shouldn’t a good horror film be horrific? My dear people it is a f****cking MOVIE. It is all fictional. Not real. It is all make-belief. It is art. Give people their own choice to watch it or not. If people can’t handle or like my movies they just don’t watch them. If people like my movies they have to be able to see it any time, anywhere also in the UK.
In the United States, people who like Six’s movies will be able to watch The Human Centipede 2 via IFC Films later this year.
In addition to The Human Centipede (First Sequence), Six directed the following:
- Gay in Amsterdam (2004), dubbed “The first Dutch film in Amsterdam gay scene” and described by one IMDb reviewer as “insulting if it weren’t so stupid”;
- Honeyz (2007), about two teenagers who get in trouble while away from home;
- I Love Dries (2008), in which hunky folk singer Dries Roelvink (as himself) is kidnapped by two fans who want his sperm so they can his baby. Complications arise because (in the film) Roelvink is sterile.
Previous post
Bloody Disgusting‘s Mr. Disgusting has revealed the news arthropod lovers everywhere had been waiting for: the cast of Tom Six’s upcoming The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), which made headlines yesterday after it was banned by the British Board of Film Classification.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) co-star Ashlynn Yennie will reprise her role as Jenny, while Laurence Harvey – not to be confused with the Academy Award-nominated star of Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top – will play the mad scientist/sex perv who, totally turned on by the first The Human Centipede, decides to create his own private human centipede.
Apparently as various sections of the centipede, also in the Human Centipede 2 cast are Dominic Borelli, Vivien Bridson, Lee Harris, Peter Charlton, Bill Hutchens, Dan Burman, Daniel Jude Gennis, Kandace Caine, Maddi Black, Lucas Hansen, Georgina Goodrick and Emma Lock.
Photo: IFC Films
‘The Human Centipede II’ Banned in the UK: Potentially Harmful & Obscene
The British Board of Film Classification has just denied a certificate to the direct-to-video release of Tom Six’s The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). In other words, the film cannot be “legally supplied” anywhere in the United Kingdom. The decision was taken by BBFC Director David Cooke and the Presidential Team of Sir Quentin Thomas, Alison Hastings and Gerard Lemos.
In the teaser trailer above, director Tom Six claims the original The Human Centipede outraged and revolted so many people that “I even get death threats on Facebook!” He then promises that The Human Centipede II will be “the sickest movie of all time.” Apparently, Six has kept his word.
I despise censorship. Always have and always will. But The Human Centipede II does sound like the sickest fuck film ever. Well, perhaps something Dario Argento would have made in the 1980s?
Below is the text of the BBFC’s The Human Centipede II ban:
The first film dealt with a mad doctor who sews together three kidnapped people in order to produce the ‘human centipede’of the title. Although the concept of the film was undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting it was a relatively traditional and conventional horror film and the Board concluded that it was not in breach of our Guidelines at ‘18′. This new work, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), tells the story of a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a DVD recording of the first film and who imagines putting the ‘centipede’ idea into practice. Unlike the first film, the sequel presents graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation, and the viewer is invited to witness events from the perspective of the protagonist. Whereas in the first film the ‘centipede’ idea is presented as a revolting medical experiment, with the focus on whether the victims will be able to escape, this sequel presents the ‘centipede’ idea as the object of the protagonist’s depraved sexual fantasy.
The principal focus of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims. Examples of this include a scene early in the film in which he masturbates whilst he watches a DVD of the original Human Centipede film, with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, and a sequence later in the film in which he becomes aroused at the sight of the members of the ‘centipede’ being forced to defecate into one another’s mouths, culminating in sight of the man wrapping barbed wire around his penis and raping the woman at the rear of the ‘centipede’. There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience. There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure. It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.
David Cooke, Director of the BBFC said: “It is the Board’s carefully considered view that to issue a certificate to this work, even if confined to adults, would be inconsistent with the Board’s Guidelines, would risk potential harm within the terms of the VRA, and would be unacceptable to the public.
“The Board also seeks to avoid classifying material that may be in breach of the Obscene Publications Acts 1959 and 1964 (OPA) or any other relevant legislation. The OPA prohibits the publication of works that have a tendency to deprave or corrupt a significant proportion of those likely to see them. In order to avoid classifying potentially obscene material, the Board engages in regular discussions with the relevant enforcement agencies, including the CPS, the police, and the Ministry of Justice. It is the Board’s view that there is a genuine risk that this video work, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), may be considered obscene within the terms of the OPA, for the reasons given above.”
Now, “Obscene Publications Acts” of 1959 and 1964? Isn’t it time for a little updating? Just make sure to keep the politically correct and religious freaks from this proposed update.
IFC Films will distribute The Human Centipede II in the United States. I’m definitely not gonna watch it. But I gotta say that the teaser trailer above is quite clever.