He Fell In Love With the Video Nasty

If you live in Great Britain and want to see the new sequel to The Human Centipede, you'd…better search for a torrent, I guess.

Catherine Shoard of The Guardian reports:

the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has denied The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) an 18 certificate for fears it poses a "real risk" to cinemagoers.

The BBFC refusal means it cannot be legally supplied anywhere in the UK -- even on DVD or download….

The BBFC described the central plot of the film as 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".

It took the rare move of refusing to classify the film and explaining that no amount of cuts would allow them to give it a certificate.

The plot of Human Centipede 2 involves a man who "becomes erotically obsessed with a DVD copy of the original film -- in which the victims are surgically stitched together mouth to anus -- and decides to recreate the idea." Presumably the board felt this was a plausible scenario.

According to The Guardian, the BBFC has banned only 11 movies in its history. (That doesn't mean the board is inactive, just that it's usually possible to satisfy the censors with cuts.) Eight of those prohibited films -- including the horror classics Freaks and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre -- were eventually allowed to be released uncut. One picture that is still officially unavailable is the recent Japanese movie Grotesque. Shoard writes that

Grotesque's director, Koji Shiraishi, responded warmly to the ban, saying he was "delighted and flattered … since the film is an honest, conscientious work, made to upset the so-called moralists".

Bonus link: South Park's take on The Human Centipede.