The End of Tom Six review – Human Centipede director delivers one last freaky flick

Fifteen years ago, Dutch film-maker Tom Six succeeded where almost everybody fails – particularly in the world of horror. He actually shocked people. No self-respecting sophisticate admits to being shocked, of course, and no horror connoisseur will admit to being really and truly horrified. But Six really did freak audiences out with his extreme exploitation nightmare The Human Centipede, the first of a trilogy. It was a grenade in the faces of prim conformists, and also those badass horror fans who thought they’d seen it all.

The “human centipede” of the title is created by a sadistic surgeon who imprisons three young people in a basement and sews them together mouth-to-anus as a vivisectional experiment. Six himself had been a director on the original Dutch TV show Big Brother that started the global franchise, and it was easy to see how his movie masterwork was intended as a satire on consumerist voyeurism and cruelty. Or maybe it just sprang from the same dark creative place that gave birth to the TV phenomenon of the age.

Either way, I remember tottering out of the screening theatre after watching it and whimpering to the critic and novelist Anthony Quinn that cinema was over now and that we should all go back to making our own entertainment like basket-weaving or singing around the piano. I conceded the first Human Centipede’s demonic punk inspiration, lost patience with the sequel, but found the third film unexpectedly funny. So what happened to Tom Six after that?

The answer comes in this chaotic, heavy-handed, self-indulgent, occasionally funny, zero-budget documentary, shot entirely in Six’s Amsterdam apartment – a lo-fi rant that he is uploading online on a pay-what-you-want basis. However huge The Human Centipede was, a massive talking point and punchline on numberless US TV comedies and talkshows, it didn’t make the director rich. As with the 70s adult movie Deep Throat, there is a mystery here about where exactly the profits went. Six went straight back to work on a comparably crazy and offensive feature called The Onania Club (tagline: “come and see, see and come”) about a group of bored American women who are addicted to other people’s pain. As he shrewdly says, it was “all safely metaphorical”, so that the horror had the status of satire.

But Covid had upset the industry and timid distributors refused to touch it, despite rave reviews from luminaries including John Waters. And to make matters worse, Six found out he had multiple sclerosis, which has now confined him to his apartment almost continuously, except for painful walks outside to get decaffeinated coffee, which is all he can digest (“like a hooker that only wants to cuddle”).

Six addresses the camera wearing hat and sunglasses, as if he is disguised as Hunter S Thompson, and he is comically (or not comically) surrounded by a ragtag circus of unlikely people that comprise his crew, including his vampily dressed, cocktail-quaffing partner Marci (Maartje Willems), and a small child doing the editing. There is a frowning “censor Nazi” (Servaes Nelissen) in full uniform, who is always whingeing about the proceedings being offensive – which is the cue for a great deal of rather tiresome comedy about woke attitudes. Six contrasts this tyrant with his grandfather, a heroic fighter in the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance in the second world war. (Strangely, he doesn’t talk about Big Brother.)

And yet, despite all its very laboured non-PC humour, this film does have a relevant story to tell: about the terrible end awaiting all those who embark on risk-taking careers in indie film-making that end in failure. This slapdash aria of complaint has something in common with the rackety defiance of German exploitation maestro Uwe Boll who, grumpily out of step with liberal squeamishness, appeared in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World and directed the controversial revenge thriller Citizen Vigilante. Six deserves his chapter in indie-cinema history, arguably alongside Sam Fuller and Roger Corman. And someone should release The Onania Club, or at least put it on at a festival. Can the UK’s Frightfest oblige?