Centipede! (2004)
- Andrew Smith
- 22 hours ago
- 5 min read
"Deep in the Earth terror awaits"
Plot
A group of friends head into a remote cave network in India for a weekend of adventure and fun. However, they don't realise that the caves are home to oversized, flesh-eating centipedes, mutated from a hidden underground storage of toxic waste. A cave-in makes their problems worse as they now must head deeper and further into the cave system in order to find an exit.
Review
Pre-dating similar monster-in-a-cave films such as critical darling The Descent, big studio misfire The Cave and made for TV cheese fest Caved-In: Prehistoric Terror, Centipede! at least has the distinction of being slightly ahead of the game. However, I must re-iterate the fact that, yes, the title is correct - the film does feature KILLER CENTIPEDES as its monsters. Cue the manic laughter from the dozens of people who would even consider watching this. Killer centipedes! I think I've heard it all now. Rats I can understand as they carry disease and swarm you. Dogs at a push because they have the teeth and muscle to have killed people. Slugs I can take with some alcohol to suspend my disbelief. But centipedes! Excuse me whilst I go and dry my eyes. Horror all begins with that a first hurdle, which is getting the audience to buy into the threat. Here, you have an incredibly high hurdle to jump when your monster is a bug most people casually step over on their driveway - I've flicked those things off my garden patio!
Now that I've calmed down a little bit, it's time to examine the film. Is it as bad as it sounds? Yes. Even the cheesiest and most annoying monster-in-a-cave films like Caved In: Prehistoric Terror have one thing going for them - at least they're well-paced. Centipede! takes an eternity to get going after the inevitable opening cold kill to get audiences hooked in. And I mean an eternity. There are plenty of boneheaded characters introduced at the start of the film including a borderline racist Indian guide who wears rags and takes them underground. They explore a bit. And a bit more. Then they party. Just when things are looking up and the cave-in happens thanks to a centipede attack, it takes ages for the centipedes to start strutting their stuff once again. So, we’re back to the exploring and moving through dark tunnels. Centipede! has no forwards momentum; there never seems to be any end game for large swathes of the first half of the film. Momentum hides flaws in films because you can never dwell on something for too long.
Pacing is a definite problem here and once you've lost the audience to boredom, it takes a hell of a lot to get them back and you need to work twice as hard just to even try and drum up interest again. Centipede! doesn't manage to even get you curious after you've lost your original interest. It's just formulaic genre stuff but without a tad bit of entertainment. The attack scenes are filmed without any real urgency or violence (I don't know whether it was cut or whether it was just filmed this way). The characters seem to casually walk from tunnel to tunnel and not really change their expressions despite their dwindling numbers. Even the centipedes look disinterested at times when they can finish someone off. There is never the sense of any real threat or urgency to what is happening. If the characters are so nonchalant about their subterranean experience, then why should I care? It's like watching people wait in line in a queue, but occasionally one of them disappears, and everyone else just shuffles forward a spot without questioning it.
I must admit the centipedes do look pretty cool even if they can't move anyway except up and down. They are physical models, but they've been made to look gigantic compared to the cast, with plenty of razor-sharp teeth and a definite slimy structure to their bodies. Structurally, they can only move up and down, which is kind of hilarious to picture when you think about how someone must have been furiously pumping a lever under the floorboards to get them to move. But the filmmaker uses that limitation to give them this uncanny habit of popping out from the smallest of holes in the cave walls. If these models can only move vertically, having one burst upward out of a narrow crevice plays perfectly into a primal fear of tight spaces and things lurking in the cracks. In fact, in one scene, a centipede swims and grabs someone from under the water. Don’t expect to see anything too gruesome though and this one is very short on blood and gore.
Did the makers of Centipede! at least use the claustrophobia of a subterranean cave to their advantage? Of course, they failed spectacularly to set the scene which is mind-boggling because setting the scene in a cave should be the easiest part of the production. It's dark, it's damp, it's claustrophobic. You literally have to turn off the lights. This cave system is one of the most convenient places for these bugs to run around. I mean there are plenty of pools, underground tunnels, big caverns and lots of light to illuminate the place up so they can see their victims. At least The Descent won top marks for scrimping on the light - after all, this is supposed to be set under the ground so where is all this unnatural background light coming from? Where are the tight squeezes and suffocatingly low ceilings? Where is the oppressive atmosphere that you’d get being so far underground? The worst thing is that when the centipedes do attack, the film suddenly goes a lot darker so that it’s hard to make out what is going on. The centipedes get their stomachs filled and move off and then miraculously everything is back to being illuminated again. Even in fairly shallow depths, there is absolute darkness in a cave aside from whatever the cavers bring with them. With this place being so illuminated, you can spot the set a mile away.
I lost track of who was who, except for Margaret Cash who looked a little like Lara Croft in her tight top and climbing equipment. It’s weird because she’s the best thing about the cast by a long way but, as of 2026 when I’m redoing these old reviews, Centipede! is still her only acting credit. That goes for a lot of the cast too who seemed to appear in a handful of films or TV shows and then that was it. Judging by their performances here, I’m not in the slightest bit surprised. The Indian police characters’ acting is so glaringly terrible under these bright lights that I assume they must have just been hired straight from the local village on the very last day of shooting and then went back to their day jobs afterwards with a few photos of their day in an American production (this was a joint American-Indian shoot).
Final Verdict
I was a fool to think a film about a killer centipede was ever going to be anything but a total dud. Centipede! proves the age-old argument right that you can judge a book by it's cover...in this case a really, really bad monster flick turns out to be a really, really bad monster flick.
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Centipede! Director(s): Gregory Gieras Writer(s): Gregory Gieras Actor(s): Larry Casey, Margaret Cash, Trevor Murphy, George Foster, Matthew Pohlson, Danielle Kirlin, Steve Herd, Anuj Garwata Duration: 93 mins |  |
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