The Human Centipede The most infamous film ever banned in Britain was A Clockwork Orange 1971, and that happened because, at the time, it was literally perceived to be striking too close to home. The way that the expatriate Anglophile Stanley Kubrick directed his adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange is a very English movie, a kind of boarding-school delinquent’s snotty birth-of-punk nightmare, with “naughtiness” inflated into puckish sadism. Malcolm McDowell’s Alex was the sociopathic id who was begging, in essence, for a spanking, but many commentators looked at the brutal antics of Alex and his droogs and feared copy-cat crimes (which had begun to be reported.
And so did Kubrick, who ultimately had the film pulled from distribution. The anxiety, of both critics and the filmmaker himself, inflated what should have been a simple issue of outrageous art — and the right to create and distribute it into one of public safety. took me back to a previous era, when movies that smashed taboos could really generate some infamy, could seem almost outside the law. Of course, the way it works now, when horror junkies routinely seek out and gorge upon the most vile and extreme movies they can find, the announcement that the British Board of Film Classification had denied Human Centipede II an “18 certificate,” effectively squashing the right for it to be shown in any form in the UK, basically became a signal to those same horror junkies the world over. The signal said: Here, in case there was any doubt, is a movie you most definitely want to see.
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