film

The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence (2015)

One of the most egregious examples of unmet expectations in the entire horror canon…perhaps even cinematic history in general.

I had no idea this film even existed until a few hours ago, and once I saw it, I was instantly excited at the thought of seeing the “Final Sequence” when it came to the idea of the “Human Centipede.” Much to my shock and disappointment, the third installment is a monumental letdown.  Not only does it fail to match the tone of the first two, it suffers from being a pretty damn terrible movie in its own right.  Is there anything redeeming about this final act?  No, no I don’t think so at all.

To be fair, the first two films weren’t necessarily stellar, but they will go down in the annuls of the horror genre as modern body-horror classics.  Despite their shortcomings they are twisted, perverse, and unnerving…you can find grosser or gorier films when you start poking around the Z-movie catalogs of some Italian filmmakers, though The Human Centipede series will probably hold the title of “most widely seen ultra-disturbing film.”  There’s always something more disgusting out there, but the fact that The Human Centipede has somewhat entered into public consciousness is a testament to….well….it’s a testament to something.

Personally I found the first film, First Sequence, a little tame compared to its claims and the surrounding hype.  Most of the gore/grossness was implied.  Was it effective?  Mostly, yes, due largely to the psychological angles approached by Dr. Heiter and the poor souls doomed to “the centipede.”  But was it visceral?  Hardly.  Here’s where the second film, Full Sequence, picks up the slack.  Full Sequence is the film that us horror buffs and gorehounds expected First Sequence to be.  Laurence Harvey plays a sufficiently disgusting, reprehensible individual in a world where First Sequence is simply a film that inspires him to chain not 3, but 16 individuals together into “a centipede.”  I don’t know if I’d call the second installment “good,” but it definitely delivers on the premise.  We see the full extent of what being stitched “mouth to anus” entails, complete with plenty of literal blood and shit.

Tom Six, the proverbial pusher-of-the-envelope who came up with the idea, once said something like, “the second film is like Disney compared to the third” (paraphrasing).  Well well well Mr. Six, bring it on!

Similar to Centipede 2, Centipede 3 opens in a universe where the first two films are films, not actual events.  These films act as the inspiration for our characters, and in an interesting sort of meta-configuration, the actors of the main villain from the first flick (Dieter Laser) and the second movie (Laurence Harvey) return as all-new characters.  With Six already playing so whimsically with reality, it seemed fitting.  Unfortunately, the realization that you’re once again watching Laser and Harvey in new roles might just be the high point of Final Sequence.

Laser gave a sufficiently unique and creepy performance as the reclusive Dr. Heiter.

Laser, as Dr. Deiter in First Sequence, played an excellent mad scientist, playing in part off of this idea that us Westerners have of some aged former Nazi in seclusion continuing to carry out twisted human experiments.  Is he supposed to be a Nazi?  Are we just a little too well-conditioned to thinking that anything sounding vaguely German is inherently menacing?  Who knows; but it works.  Sadly for us, Six tries to morph this “ex-Nazi mad scientist” into something like a psychotic Texan prison warden…with horrendous results.  I imagine Six going for something akin to Tommy Lee Jones as Dwight McClusky from Natural Born Killers (and indeed the character played by Harvey, Laser’s right-hand man, is named Dwight) but either Six had a really warped vision or Laser simply did a terrible job.  Maybe both.

However, he fails miserably at portraying the stereotypical would-be psychotic prison warden from Texas.

Laser plays a character named “Bill Boss,” who shouts his way through 80% of the film.  It’s very hard to understand him at times, and he has a habit of drawing out syllables as well.  Throw that German-ish accent on top of it all and you have an incomprehensible mess.  Even if he wasn’t hard to understand, the shouting is totally unnecessary and comes across as infantile, overcompensating, and downright stupid.  Sometimes Laser isn’t even shouting words, just odd sounds.  Other times he’s drawing out a word like “fucked” for 10 or 15 seconds, or maybe he’s shouting “dried clitorises,” or just rambling about his “dick getting hard.”  Yes, the dialog is purposefully as offensive as possible, with colorful tints of racism, sexism, and probably some other -isms I missed.  What is he trying to accomplish?  What kind of performance was Six hoping Laser would channel?  These are questions which should’ve been asked a long time ago.  A little yelling and the occasional fit of bizarrely offensive language would’ve given some nuance and even some black comedy to the performance, but what we’re forced to endure is painful and embarrassing.  I can only assume we’re supposed to believe that Boss has balls big enough for a dumptruck, but instead his ramblings come off as forced, puerile, and frankly quite irritating.

We get a little bit of eye candy courtesy of porn star Olson, but Bill Boss’ behavior quickly sucks the beauty out of anything.

The rest of the cast if forgettable at best; if only we could forget “Bill Boss.”  Harvey is serviceable as the accountant, Bree Olson provides some eye candy as the secretary (which Boss profusely exploits at every turn), and you’ll recognize a few other faces such as the aged governor and that guy from The Dark Knight who threw the detonator off the boat.  Tom Six even appears as – guess who – himself, which is pretty pathetic to say the least.  He humbly walks into the prison offices and is asked to give his autograph…give me a break.  Nobody knows who the hell you are Tom, and those who do are going to wish they didn’t after seeing this!

The previous films at least had some sort of plot.  In both cases we were presented with unhinged individuals who got this sick idea into their heads and did what they could to make it a reality.  However, Final Sequence gets a little too serious for its own good and retains loftier ambitions.  Prison costs are soaring, and the governor is riding Boss, the warden, and his accountant Dwight for a solution.  He threatens to fire them both if they haven’t found a way to control costs by his next visit.  Dwight, who is fairly mild-mannered, tries to reason with Boss.  Many of Boss’ psychotic tirades are contributing to the exorbitant operating costs, including activities like “boiling water boarding” and an impromptu castration that the audience is forced to witness, among other atrocities.  Undeterred, Boss keeps on chewing on dried clits and having his cooks serve him medium-rare testicles for lunch.

With termination imminent, Dwight persuades Boss to watch the previous Human Centipede films and suggests a “prison human centipede” as a solution to rising costs.  Initially unconvinced, Dwight finally brings in Tom Six himself and stages a meeting between himself, Six, Boss, and the prison’s unlicensed doctor to discuss the medical feasibility of chaining several humans together “mouth to anus.”  After a protracted and really, really stupid conversation about the soundness of such a procedure, Boss gives the go ahead.

We’re over an hour into the film at this point with very little gore or disturbing imagery, save for the aforementioned castration and a particularly depraved dream sequence where Boss imagines himself the victim of prison rape…except instead of using one of his existing orifices, the inmate cuts a hole into Boss’ “soft kidney tissue” and proceeds to have sex with the wound.  Yeah.

Nothing in Centipede 3 even comes close to the level of suffering, degradation, filth, and disgust from the second film.

Anyway, just when it seems like we’ll finally be privy to something besides Laser’s yelling, we’re treated to an exceedingly drawn out surgery process with little snippets of gore/grossness and some gross insinuations, but nothing like the material running through the previous films.  With less than 20 minutes left in what is already an overly long film, we finally get to the “prison human centipede.”  The governor returns to fire the two sickos, but they quickly lead him on a “tour” where he’s introduce to the monstrosity at the same time as the audience.  The effect is…disappointing.  It’s the same “ass to mouth” set-up from the first film, but without any of the gore and filth fully fleshed out in Full Sequence.  Just a bunch of prisoners in orange suits on all fours in a line….  There are a few seconds where defecation is implied but we don’t see anything.  And unlike First Sequence where the audience was made to sympathize with the victims, everyone in Final Sequence is utterly unlikable, prisoners and prison staff alike.

Turns out that 500 prisoners have been chained together in this manner (including Daisy, the secretary, who was injured during an earlier altercation with the prisoners and inserted into the chain seemingly without any reason) but I don’t think the visual had the effect that Six had intended.   In an attempt to throw one more shock at the crowd, Boss and Dwight lead the governor to their “human centipede improvement, copyright Bill Boss,” or as they call it, “the human caterpillar.”  This configuration aims to be a solution to life-ers and deaths row inmates; in addition to being attached mouth-to-anus, they’ve also had their arms and legs removed.  Again, the effect is lackluster, and we never even get a close look at it presumably due to the practical concerns of making severa people appear without limbs.

I won’t say that the first two films are believable, but they seem to be rooted in distant plausibility.  After all, Jeffrey Dahmer tried to make sex slaves by pouring acid into his victim’s brains, and he kept body parts in his fridge and freezer.  Ed Gein maintained a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like home for several years filled with knick-knacks made from human remains.  John Wayne Gacy had at least 33 bodies buried in his crawl space.  That crazy guy in Austria locked his daughter in an underground series of rooms below his house and fathered children with her.  People do get away with some sick shit everyone once in a while, and I think the audience can sort of see where a deranged individual might decide to create such a thing.  But the absurdity in chaining together the inmate population of a prison is just too much to handle.

What’s even weirder is that Boss and Dwight act as if they’re true visionaries while explaining themselves to the governor.  Nothing about their explanation of the “prison human centipede” contains even a hint of ethical concern or questionable morality – or legality for that matter – it’s as if this was a perfectly viable cost-cutting measure.  For a moment there I began to wonder if this was supposed to be an alternate reality.  At last, after the grand tour, the governor finally speaks up.  Visibly sickened, he reprimands the two and mentions that they’ll both be put to death for their actions and then leaves, speechless and overwhelmed.

Boss begins to panic.  The doctor comes in and mentions that he’s ready to start teaching surgical teams around the country to perform the procedure (how he ever procured the necessary staff to chain 500 people together is unknown to us), and then Boss inexplicably shoots him.  Moments later, it appears he’s ready to execute Dwight as well.  Out of nowhere, the governor bursts back into the room with an approving grin, talking about what a magnificent solution this is and how happy it’s going to make the US government.  HUH!?  Vindicated, Boss and Dwight share a moment of relief.  Dwight reminds Boss that the centipede was “his idea.”  Boss seems grateful, gives Dwight a hug…..and then shoots him in the head.  The film closes with Boss hanging out of the window of one of the guard towers making unintelligible noises into the megaphone.  Why am I recounting all of these plot points?  To point out just how ludicrous things get….

What the fuck happened!?  Final Sequence didn’t have that much of a plot to worry about and yet takes multiple nonsensical detours during its final minutes.  Why the hell did Boss start shooting people?  Why did the governor, so obviously disturbed by what he saw, suddenly have the revelation that this was the “final solution”?  How hard did Six and his crew have to try to fuck up a simple story about some twisted weirdos with a shit fetish who wanted to stitch people together!?

There is so much wrong with this film, yet its most egregious violation is its lack of delivery when it comes to gore and disturbing energy.  Six ran his idea into the ground during Final Sequence, and instead of showing the audience a bunch of sick shit, he just has Laser shout them incomprehensibly to the point of sheer absurdity.  When you’ve a name like “The Human Centipede” and when you’re set to follow up films like the first two, all you’ve really got to do is top the gore, the perversion, the depravity, and pretty much all else will be forgiven.  But Six couldn’t even manage that and little nuggets like summary castration and “kidney rape” aren’t enough to justify the existence of Centipede 3.

I can’t recommend this film to anyone.  I can’t imagine anyone enjoying this so-called production.  Six had the chance to go out with a bang by making good on his promise of the sick and twisted for part 3 of his trilogy, but I guess he had other plans in mind – can this really be the film that he wanted cap things off with?  Is he able to sit through Laser’s prolonged hissy-fit?  Does he see that line of 500 prisoners and think, “boy that’s way sicker than all the moaning and crying and shit-spewing from the second film”?  I don’t think so.  And so I posit, what made him think the audience would see anything different?  It’s never easy to fathom why a bad film is released, though it often boils down to shadowy financial issues.  I don’t know if that’s what happened here or not – maybe Six accidentally used up his budget filming Laser shout and was pressured into putting out something.  Honestly I can’t imagine anyone standing by this piece of junk.

Written by The Cubist