Tom Six Doc Captures Post-Centipede Life With MS
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- Tom Six released The End of Tom Six, a zero-budget documentary shot entirely in his Amsterdam apartment that he is uploading online on a pay-what-you-want basis after finding no distributor willing to release it.
- Six has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which has confined him to his apartment almost continuously except for walks to get decaffeinated coffee — the only thing he can digest.
- The Onania Club, Six's follow-up feature to the Human Centipede trilogy, received rave reviews from John Waters but was refused by distributors after Covid disrupted the industry, leaving it unshown.
- Despite The Human Centipede's status as a massive US talkshow punchline and cultural phenomenon, the film never made Six rich — a financial mystery the reviewer compares to the unresolved question of where Deep Throat's profits went.
- The documentary features Six's partner Maartje Willems (credited as Marci) and a recurring 'censor Nazi' character played by Servaes Nelissen, with a small child doing the editing.
- The reviewer argues Six deserves a chapter in indie-cinema history alongside Uwe Boll, Sam Fuller, and Roger Corman, and calls on the UK's Frightfest festival to screen The Onania Club.
Why it matters: Six's trajectory — enormous cultural notoriety from The Human Centipede without corresponding financial reward, an unreleased John Waters–praised follow-up that post-Covid distributors refused to touch, and now a self-funded documentary made from his apartment while battling MS — captures how transgressive indie filmmakers can end up documenting their own decline rather than continuing to create. For distributors and festival programmers, the case underscores that risk-averse gatekeeping can strand provocative work indefinitely.
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