Customer Reviews

Centipede

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

A group of friends (or are they) go caving in India as a send-off just before one is to get married. They descend a dangerous cave with the help of a local guide. Once at the bottom they seem to think the best safety measure is to get stoned. Well, one wanders off to answer a call of nature, gets attacked by the title beastie and sets of a cave in that traps the others.

Now the group must find a way out of the cave system while it dawns on them that they are not alone in the dark. Soon it becomes a run for their lives as the giant centipede decides they are the best thing on the menu.

This is not quite a typical stuck with a monster film. There is a little more depth although it can be lost amongst the mediocre acting and bad special effects. The movie opens with some students getting attacked in the cave. Their professor leads a rescue effort when they discover the party in the cave. Nice switching between the effort to escape from within and the effort to rescue from without. A bigger budget could have made for an excellent movie, but it is still fun as is.

Centipede didn't offer much in the way of gore but who cares! We get a real deal rubber centipede instead of a computer graphic and that just made this film for me. The centipede scuttles, hisses, rears up and even swims!! Hooray for Maverick! They could have easily gone the route of CG and bad acting but they choose mediocre acting and an animatronic monster and for that they deserve a round of applause.

One low point of the film for me though was the women. They give us two smoking hotties (Zoe and Sara) who dress in skimpy clothes and even dance around a fire like strippers on a 3 day Meth binge and yet we get no orbs of flesh or naughty parts. Nudity could have only helped the film to be honest. To make matters worse the lead female Sara (Margaret Cash) has big budget looks, porn film goodies and a Betty Boop voice. Ugh! You'll be forced to do nothing but plug your ears and watch her shake. What a goofy film though. Monster enthusiasts will dig this! It's definitely a beer and Cheetos flick so put away the dictionary and cancel your weekly Mensa gathering and switch the brain on autopilot.

I'm one of those people who like Grade B horror and sci-fi movies (even Grade Z sometimes) with non-CGI monsters. I think Centipede is actually a pretty good little movie that mixes the old style monster genre with the young-good-looking-twentysomethings in peril plot. I also liked the fact that Centipede was actually shot and is set in a non-typical locale -- the country of India. To me, it was a lot more fun to watch than the recent spate of cartoony CGI monster movies or indie sadist killer horror movies. If you enjoy the old style monster movies from the 50s and 60s like me, you might enjoy watching Centipede. I did.

I know what you're thinking. "Wow! They made a movie version of the hit arcade game!" Well...OK maybe you're NOT thinking that, but believe me that's a far cooler idea than what we got here.

A bunch of young adults go spelunking in India - don't ask how a group of young people could afford the trip, and don't ask why India looks like southern California - and proceed to drink beer, listen to loud music, and pee on the walls before a giant centipede comes and attacks them. I have to side with the centipede here: imagine you're sitting at home watching TV when some guy walks in, unzips his pants, and proceeds to pee on the wall. How would you feel? If you had mandibles of doom you'd kill him too right?

Lot's of people die. To be honest I really didn't care, because I could've cared less about these characters. They might as well have been called "Generic Teenager #1," "Generic Teenager #2," and so on. Plus they're to blame for emoting the terrible lines from the script. By the way, you know that story about how Hugh Jackman started adding "Bub" to his "X-Men" dialogue? Something similar must've been done here because the characters throw the word "dude" around so much it deserves it's own drinking game.

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York, dude."

Don't watch. If you decide to any way, enjoy Las Vegas, India as well a cheap centipede mannequin that gets dragged around the set by gaffers. Dude.

When the title came up on the screen, it actually had an exclamation point after it... CENTIPEDE! Like a musical. Come to think of it, this movie might have been better if it had a couple of snappy musical numbers in it. It makes you wonder if they were going for that self-referencing Sci-Fi PG-13 funny/scary movie thing that Blue Devil, Monster Island and Bite Me! have captured so effectively. A bunch of spelunkers go to India to explore a creepy cave before one of them goes off to get married. Like a bachelor party in a cave or something like that. They are attacked by giant latex centipede puppets. The end.

Not much to recommend here, boils and ghouls, except for one truly bizarre moment. So, this Indian guide leads our heroes down into the cave, and they all decide to have a party while their in the bowels of the earth. We find out through some really unsubtle exposition that the soon-to-be-married guy used to have a thing with one of the other girls on the trip. There's supposed sexual tension between them as they try to ignore each other. I guess this girl was supposed to be sultry and sexy and mysterious. I thought she was kinda Plain Jane, but maybe the director was dating her or something. We'll call her CC (Casting Couch) for short, because I can't remember her character's name.

While they're all partying down in the caves, someone turns on a radio and some of them start dancing. Really awkward, watching all these actors trying to pretend like they are having fun. It's a cringe-fest. But then they all start looking at CC and chanting, "Do the dance. Do the dance." She coyly shakes her head. I was watching it thinking that this must be why they cast her, maybe she can do some freakish thing like wrap her legs around her head and dance like that. So this big build-up around the DANCE, and when she finally gets up and does it... it's like this White Girl Cabbage Patch thing that, quite literally, gave me a stabbing pain in my stomach. It was a NAPOLEON DYNAMITE moment. I watched her do the DANCE like five times in a row. It was crazy. I wanted to vomit. That's why I say maybe they should have kept the exclamation point at the end of the title and made this movie into some weird kind of horror/musical.

This is about a group of college kids who go to India to explore a cave. Of course, once in the depths of the cave, they're attacked by giant centipedes.

This movie fulfills most of the expectations a person might have of a low budget monster movie: You've got a sexy girl running around in a tight T-shirt, you've got cheesy looking giant centipedes picking off the characters one by one, and let's not forget the incredibly cheesy scene where our lead female does a hilarious little "dance". And I thought Ellaine Bennis from Seinfeld was bad. Overall, the acting is okay and the characters are a fairly likeable bunch. The atmosphere is good - the underground caves are fairly creepy. There's good interaction between the characters and the action moves along fairly well, leading to a typically over the top ending.

I would definitely recommend this to fans of low budget, cheesy horror.

Im a sucker for monster movies...and this one is not too bad.
The only reason it gets a 3 star its because of the caving scencery.
Caves are great for monster movies...too bad you have a bunch of
silly humans bringing down the movie...but its not that bad, most
acting is pretty fair to good, and the monster is not too bad either. A bigger budget would have improve the situation..but its
certainly worth a viewing....

Centipede! (Gregory Gieras, 2004)

Gieras, responsible for the marginally amusing Dark Asylum a few years ago, returns to what he knows, the monster movie. Unfortunately, "what he knows" and "what he does best" are somewhat different.

Plot-- a bunch of young-and-beautifuls go caving in India, where they come upon the titular creature, which wants to kill them off one by one. As with most features of this variety, you know who's going to survive within ten minutes of the beginning of the movie, and there's little to do but stare at the young-and-beautifuls and all the icky stuff. The problem with this movie (okay, one of the problems) is that, well, there's not much icky stuff.

For that matter, there's not much else. The script is horribly botched, as is the characterization. The most intriguing character unfortunately suffers a double-whammy-- Owen (Matthew Pohlson, the only actor here with an actual career), the guy who's neurotically afraid of bugs. Or so we learn at the beginning of the movie, but then said fear just vanishes once they're down in the cave with the really big bug. Pohlson deserves some credit for at least doing his character justice; he's the only one who's in any way memorable for his actual acting skills.

The first half of the movie would have gotten one star for at least being cheesy enough to be watchable, but the second half of the movie bombs in so many ways I'm not sure I can describe them all here. The major offense is the tacking on at the end of an "oh, let's all be environmentalists" theme that can only be stomached because it's treated as stupidly as everything else in the movie, and thus can't raise bile as much as it can cynical amusement. The Indian authorities we see are treated in the sort of Kiplingesque "oh, aren't the locals amusing!" way that makes me surprised anyone with an Indian background actually agreed to take such a role. (It should be noted that this provincialism seems to exist behind the camera, as well; not a single cast member of Indian descent is credited.)

This is horrible on so many levels I'm surprised the Sci-Fi Channel actually show it-- and I'm fully aware that if it's a horrible film, the Sci-Fi Channel is all over it. This one tacks "and offensive" onto "horrible." (zero)

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This flicker just rubbered me the wrong way.
It lacked centipedal force.

The monster's not even CGI: Centiputer Generated Image - what there isn't of it.
100 to 1 it didn't have 100 legs either, not that they moved.
Maybe it should be called Pentapede. Well, ok, Octopede.
Or, Onetapede, as it's in that percentage of the movie.

I missed most of this film.
Because I kept FF it. Yes, I said...
I nearly pede my pants. Maybe because the film was that weak. Or -entipedes don't usually swim underwater.

Have I learnt my lesson yet?
This is the reason for being on Earth - it takes many many times.

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I liked this campy sci fi creature feature about a group of explorers trapped in the depths of a cave in India. It was fun and unpredictable with a satisfying ending. The location was interesting and, while the creature was a bit retro, it worked for this film. I would recommend "Centipede" to anyone who loves this genre.