I'm a little lost wondering why people think this film has an ambiguous ending.
My immediate impression after the film was that Martin got away with his crime,
went back to work, and hears a small child crying in the garage. Was that child
not the same as the one whose parents were taken from him, while being left in
the car (his mother being the pregnant woman who squashed the head of her baby)?
Agreed. That's how I interpreted it. Since he crying had been heard previously as well, when Martin was going about his business in the car park. It seems logical to assume it is the same baby and everything did happen.
shareIn before someone says "But you couldn't hear the baby crying in the scene with the two drunk girls."
shareUm no. How can you go back to work with a centipede up your ass?
Hey, if you can jerk off with sandpaper,
a centipede carcass in the *beep* is a
walk in the park.
Agreed. You CAN MOST DEFINATELY NOT go back to work with a ceptipede up your ass
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If it did all happen, Martin's days as a free man are certainly numbered. The pregnant woman has but to take the police back to where she and her husband were abducted and instantly ID Martin has their kidnapper/torturer. I think if it wasn't all just a dream, Martin is just being naive in trying to nonchalantly resume work, but the cops will get him for sure I think.
In context I think that the ending happened the day after he killed off everyone still alive in the warehouse, then rushed home, cleaned himself up, and, if he has that kind of presence of mind, also got rid of his mother's corpse and it's the next day, explaining why the boy is still alive and hasn't been found yet. If it wasn't all just Martin's fantasy then the police are coming for him very shortly.
"I mean, really, how many times will you look under Jabba's manboobs?"
It all has to be a depiction of Martin's sick fantasy, otherwise the calm ending makes no sense. The pregnant woman knew where he started and where he ended. There was no way for Martin to get to work before the police arrived. The sound of the crying baby in the background was just a red herring.
sharemel2000 is correct. Let me elaborate:-
Twice in the film you see martin laid in bed, hearing a crying baby with the voice over: "Stop them tears, yer jus' makin' daddy's willy harder."
Martin is most likely imagining the baby cry because of his abuse as a child and those words spoken by his dad are obviously embedded in his mind.
The whole thing was a fantasy. He is a miserable, tormented individual living a dull and depressing life. There's no way he would be able to return to work after the events shown. Especially when one of his victims potentially escaped and knew where he worked.
Hope this helps
I completely disagree. The noises in his head are nothing more than an explanation for his condition, and act as a reasoning for his demented acts. It's entirely possible the woman who escaped didn't even go to the police after such a traumatic affair, you'd be surprised how many crimes go completely unreported and judging by her mental state I'd be more likely to assume she just went and drove into a lake or something.
There was absolutely nothing about the ending that even suggests the events might have been a dream, I don't see where this bizarre rumour is coming from.
it was a dream!
From how i took it he did kill a few random people in the car park (his psychiatrist not being one of them) and his mum that same day.
i think the scene is of him planning what he'd like to do the people in his van and how everything would play out if he did. Think about it, would some high profile actress trust some creepy weird looking guy the way she did let alone talk to him......it was all a sick fantasy.
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It was not a dream, it was a fantasy, the very first scene when the credits roll on his laptop is exactly the same as the end scene but with out the baby crying.
I personally think the baby crying is his thoughts in his head, he is a very sad and tormented individual that has actually been crying all the time since birth.
Anyone who thinks that the scene is the next day and he is back at work is not thinking about it properly, he wouldnt survive the centipede, as you can clearly see he is holding his stomach in pain not long after she puts it there meaning its worked its way up pretty fast and lets face it,,, its a really nasty centipede, he would be dead pretty quickly.
dream/fantasy...same thing,
anyways, i dont think he would have died from a centipede, they are venomous and the bite is said to be ridiculously painful but rarely life threatening.
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Dreams and fantasy are 2 completely different things actually.
Ill think you will find that if something is venomous and ridiculously painful it might not be life threatening from a bite on your skin, but biting from the inside will kill you, have you ever been bitten again and again from the inside of your gut? very doubtful, its not the kinda thing they test on human subjects but im pretty sure it could be fatal.
A small piece of bacteria in the stomach or gut can cause extreme pain and even death, never mind a vicious centipede scraping and biting its way up there.
So by that post i take it that you have had such an experience yourself :'(
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I think the biggest reason to think it was a day dream is because do we really think a guy like Martin could get actors to fly in to audition in a movie? Or convince agents that he is really representing Quentin Tarantino?
If this whole movie was a fantasy, then it would have played out like a fantasy, i.e., nobody dies on him, nobody escapes, nobody sticks a centipede up his rear.
Think about it, a fantasy wouldn't have had so many mistakes, it would have been flawless. In this movie world, it did happen and he's probably going to be meeting with authorities soon.
A fantasy by a disturbed individual like Martin may not play out in his mind flawlessly. His self-doubts etc. would cause him to question his abilities, make him think about what could go wrong, etc. Not all dreams / day dreams are happy ... they call them nightmares.
Also if you think about it NO ONE escape while just being held shackled by DUCT TAPE??? In ALL the time he leaves them alone no one moves next to another person and they work together to rip off the tape? I mean c'mon people! If you were captured and left there with just duct tape you mean you couldn't find away out of there?
My thought is when he sees the people in the car park that's real and then he begins to fantasize/dream about capturing them. So to ME... key word there ME... it was all a fantasy/dream. If YOU choose to think it was all real then that's your experience with the movie.
I agree Grape, I think the ending was purposefully left open to interpetation.
shareLike 2 others mentioned, there is NO way he'd be able to somehow persuade an actress to get in his van and come into that creepy place with him. He doesn't even talk!! Another scene that I felt made it obviously a fantasy (in retrospect) was the scene where the therapist is getting head from the hooker in the car, and he says something like "I'd rather *beep* that retarded boy!" Like a well-respected Doctor would just flat out admit (even to a pimp and a hooker) that he was a closeted homosexual who is attracted to his mentally challenged (and disgusting) patient.
"Are you hinting my apples aren't what they ought to be?"
Another action in favor of the "Fantasy" theory is the way he kept everyone in line by repeatedly whacking them with a tire iron and never cracking a skull or killing anyone. All of his centipede parts were simply knocked out when he didn't need them and fully awake when he did.
shareThis "Fantasy" discussion frankly amuses me.
I don't recall any serious talk about HC1 being a fantasy, so I think people go ahead and would say "it actually happened". At least in HC1's proposed universe.
But then HC2 starts off immediately saying HC1 didn't actually happen. It's was just a movie in HC2's universe.
I think HC3 will have to address each of the other two movies somehow, resolving the ambiguities in some way.
It feels a bit like parallel realities, in which case, our "rules" my not apply. E.G. perhaps in HC2's reality, magic crowbars do exist. In HC3's reality, Martin and Dr. Heiter may co-exist.
You never have daydreams wondering "what if...?" where complications come up? If no one did this, we wouldn't have novels and TV shows except those with very straightforward plots.
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"I completely disagree. The noises in his head are nothing more than an explanation for his condition, and act as a reasoning for his demented acts. It's entirely possible the woman who escaped didn't even go to the police after such a traumatic affair, you'd be surprised how many crimes go completely unreported and judging by her mental state I'd be more likely to assume she just went and drove into a lake or something."
Ok, first off, we're debating reality of an ending that was clearly left ambiguous. Its probable the woman crashed during her escape and died... Or maybe not. Maybe incidentally, she crashed another car, managed to survive (cause hell, she already died once) and was taken to the hospital and IDed martin.
"There was absolutely nothing about the ending that even suggests the events might have been a dream, I don't see where this bizarre rumour is coming from."
Its not just the ending. Personally, there are many things i don't buy.
1. How he got Ashlynn Yennie and convinced her that she would be in Quentin Tarantino film. Seriously, WTF. How the hell did he pull that off? I know she isnt a big name actress, but, tarantino is a big name director, how did he manage to fool both her, and her... Agent (i assume)?
2. The crying baby in the car. If that is a parking garage, someone, at some point during one day (cause lets remember, this took several days. After all we see him sleeping at his apartment) would have found it. I dont buy that the baby just, stayed there and no one, ever, managed to find him in a freaking parking garage. Due the fact that the film is in black and white, its hard to tell between day and night. Regardless, whether it was prior or during the time he performed the surgery, i would think someone would have found the crying baby.
3. Is he seriously the only guard there? I dunno how stuff works in London, but the parking garages I've been to have at least, 2 or 3 men guarding. If there was another guard, i missed him... And that just furthers my point about the crying baby and martin's actions.
To me, all that up there screams "fantasy/dream". The ending, is him... Sitting fine because nothing happened. He was merely imagining he was doing all of that. Which is it ending, as soon the credits of the first film show up. It snapped him back to reality. It was all in his head.
I agree. Plus, he kept getting bloodier and dirtier and going back to work to get more victims. He previously showed no sign of being capable of covering his tracks. I definitely see it as a daydream.
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While he's back at his desk, the child crying is indeed the same one (the same cries, at least) as the one that had his parents taken from him. I believe the director intentionally left the ending open for interpretation. It could either mean Martin concocted the whole thing in his head, or he'd gotten away with it & was back at work.
If it was all in his head, it would explain why he was still infatuated with the original movie. It doesn't seem like someone who had gone through all of what he did, far surpassing the sickness level of the thing that inspired it, would find the original movie that enticing anymore. Why would he still sit there drooling over The Human Centipede, after he'd actually had the actress in it, who he was so infatuated with, under his own control (more or less)? That just doesn't seem likely. In real life, people who torture then kill their victims keep on doing more & more extreme things as the original excitement begins to become commonplace.
If it was all in Martin's head, it would also explain why he doesn't get caught or suspected of anything by his (nonexistent in the movie) boss or authority figures. Everything he does is recorded by the parking garage video cameras. Even if Martin turned them off or deleted the content of him abducting people, his boss would still wonder why the nightly footage was coming up short, and missing big chunks of time (there is a timer on those tapes). If all those people disappeared at the time when they would have been in the parking garage, the tapes would no doubt be gone over by police, eventually. He would undoubtedly get caught shortly, even if he made an effort to hide everything & clean up (like all the huge blood splatters where he hit people with the crowbar, or shot them).
Martin was supposedly mentally slow, so maybe he really did do all that & just went back to his job as if nothing happened, and likely got caught shortly thereafter. He apparently left the kid crying in the car, as indicated by the crying at the end, and that wouldn't sit there long without someone else noticing that there were bullet holes & blood everywhere as well. He killed far too many people to cover it all up, including his mother & the doctor, and the guy in the car with the dr. While he's sitting there in the booth in the final scene, he doesn't have the wounds on his head that he had, either, so it makes you wonder how much time has passed. Apparently the kid is still in the car crying, but Martin is all clean & healed-up. Who knows, maybe the kid crying is just in Martin's head, too?
It seems viable either way.
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I can't understand your crazy moon language.
I'm the complete opposite, I can't believe anyone thinks it WASN'T a fantasy.
shareThis is basically the God argument. There's nothing in the film that specifically nods toward the events being a dream, yet for some reason, people seem to believe it is.
It's not up to anyone to prove it really happened, as their argument is essentially that you see it all, that what's happening before your eyes is a given. It's up to the people who think it's a dream to provide evidence for that theory, and there just isn't enough to hold water if you ask me.
Ahem.............it was a movie people don't try so hard to make sense of it. In my opinion Martin was at work watching the film fantasizing how he could make his own human centipede. Fantasizing how he would do it so much better than the original film. He was just daydreaming how the events would unfold if he had enough guts to do it. Murdering his mother was fantasy too because of her not protecting him from his abusive father so her murder was included in his fantasy.
Part three though in my opinion will be him finally carrying out his fantasy acting on his impulses. The crying you hear at the end was the crying he heard in his head throughout the film his inner abused child crying.
Sure there's something in the film that nods toward this: the sound of the same kid crying, meaning it can't have been that long that he's been there--yet Martin is not only all cleaned up and finally in clean clothes (he even drove the actress with bloody clothes on), but the wounds he had on his head are all healed.
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I agree that there are many unrealistic elements to the film, which make it more of a dark comedy. One point the film returns to throughout is the supposed "100% medically accurate" concept, which isn't true, so it's like the film revealing that this "reality" isn't all that realistic. That doesn't make it a dream or fantasy. Many films portray unrealistic circumstances intentionally.
I don't think the end was supposed to portray anything but him going back to his job afterwards. You wonder why he isn't caught, maybe he's about to be, but this film isn't realistic to begin with so there's no need to explain why he isn't caught when nothing really makes sense.
#1 reason I don't buy the fantasy idea is that things went to hell in a hand basket for him. He might fantasize about making the centipede, but he wouldn't fantasize about some pregnant woman coming back from the dead to escape while killing her baby. But another thing that lends to his inability to do things right (by way of the ending being a setup for his capture) is that he had no idea what he was doing. He tried the ass cutting and it killed a guy. So he settled for staples and duct tape. Why would a fantasy promote one's own ineptitude? As for it being a dream, you could say that about every film ever made.
The tagline from first movie would explain so many things if they only used it for second movie. Simply, "Their flesh is his fantasy."
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