OK. Dr. Heiter is a mad scientist. He was once a respected surgeon, but has now retreated to his luxurious home in the German forest, which contains an operating room in the basement. His skin has a sickly pallor, his hair is dyed black, his speech reminds us of a standard Nazi, and he gnashes his teeth. He is filled with hatred and vile perversion.

He drugs his victims and dumps them into his Mercedes. When they regain consciousness, they find themselves tied to hospital beds. He provides them with a little slide show to brief them on his plans. He will demonstrate his skills as a surgeon by — hey, listen, now you'd really better stop reading. What's coming next isn't so much a review as a public service announcement.

Heiter plans to surgically join his victims by sewing together their mouths and anuses, all in a row, so the food goes in at the front and comes out at the rear. They will move on their hands and knees like an insect. You don't want to be part of the Human Centipede at all, but you most certainly don't want to be in the middle. Why does he want to commit this atrocity? He is insane, as I've already explained.

He also wants to do it because he is in a movie by Tom Six, a Dutch director whose previous two films average 4 out of 10 on the IMDb.com scale, which is a score so low very few directors attain it. Six has now made a film deliberately intended to inspire incredulity, nausea and hopefully outrage. It's being booked as a midnight movie, and is it ever. Boozy fanboys will treat it like a thrill ride.

And yet within Six, there stirs the soul of a dark artist. He treats his material with utter seriousness; there's none of the jokey undertone of a classic Hammer horror film like “Scream … and Scream Again” (1970), in which every time the victim awoke, another limb had been amputated. That one starred the all-star trio of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and you could see they were having fun. Dieter Laser, who plays Dr. Heiter, takes the role with relentless sincerity. This is his 63rd acting role, but, poor guy, is seemingly the one he was born to play.