VOD Review: The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence (2015)

I'm honestly not sure what Tom Six was thinking when he made this movie. I know he's a maverick filmmaker who does what he wants, and doesn't care what anybody has to say about it, but there's a limit to how far up your own ass you can go with the "I'm an artist!" bullshit when you make a sorry movie like this.

I also know that art (and its worth) is a subjective thing, so let it be known that I'm not dismissing the guy out of hand just because he made a movie that I didn't like.

You can say what you will about the first two Human Centipede movies, but at least they were fairly straight-forward Horror flicks that made some sort of logical sense.

This third, and hopefully final, entry in the gross-out series though, seems more like an in-joke that we weren't privy to. Like we were late getting to the party and we only caught the punchline of an elaborate joke, and while everyone else is laughing, we're just wondering what in the hell we missed... and we'd like to think that we're smart enough to get most jokes.

"Taking inspiration from The Human Centipede films, the warden of a notorious and troubled prison looks to create a 500-person human centipede as a solution to his problems."

I took that synopsis from the movie's IMDB page, because I just don't have the strength in me to try and break down the plot like I normally do for most movies. I'm not even sure that you can say that this movie has a conventional plot to begin with, so who am I kidding. A behind-the-scenes "making of" would probably make for an interesting documentary though
 
At least there's that.

YEP. THAT'S A BIG CENTIPEDE.

There's really not a lot that we can say about The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence that is good. It didn't actually feel like much of a movie at all to us, rather than a 100-minute improv exercise for Dieter Laser, that was interspersed with some gore gags every now and then. I honestly wonder if there was even a script for this movie, and if there was, just how much of it actually made it to the screen.

The biggest problem that we had with this movie, was Dieter Laser. As much as we enjoyed him in the first movie, we couldn't stand him in this one. He overacted in such an over-the-top way in this one, that it was not only distracting, but it ground our nerves to dust by about 10 minutes in. Maybe even less than that. 90% of the movie focused on him screaming, acting crazy, or trying to look sadistic, and none of it was convincing at all. There was nothing scary or funny about him or his performance, and his heavy accent doesn't do him any dramatic favors in such a dialogue-heavy movie. By the end of it all, we honestly felt bad for him.

As for his character, Bill Boss, most of the movie was nothing more than him screaming, ranting, calling people "Nigger" "Tits" "Cunt" and a bunch of other random, offensive names, which made us wonder if Tom Six let a group of teenage boys write the script. As an adult (simple-minded as I may be), a bunch of nasty words don't make something feel edgy or gritty to me anymore, although I'm sure I would have been fairly shocked by such things when I was 12. I'm sure that it's all meant to shock, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable, or even tolerable, to watch.

WHY?!?

The movie itself is abysmal, and not because of its premise, and not because it's an artistic statement that most people (including us) aren't going to get, but because it was a genuinely bad movie. The first hour and twenty minutes are spent watching Bill Boss talk, scream, yell, and act crazy, in-between scenes of him waterboarding people with boiling water, abusing prisoners verbally and physically, waving his gun around while screaming about respect, cutting a prisoners balls off and eating them for lunch, mouth-raping his hot secretary, being raped in a hole in his side by a group of prisoners, raping his comatose secretary... There was a lot of rape in this movie. And racism. And misogyny.

I can't imagine that Tom Six is a hateful person that wants to hurt certain groups of people with ugly words or horrific acts, and even if he was, we're not interested in soapboxing about how wrong he is, so we'll just chalk it up to him using such controversial tools to make a statement of some kind. Statement or not though, it all felt fairly absurd. 

RAPE, TORTURE, OR BOTH; SOMETHING BAD IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN.

The acting in this one is bad across the board. It's not like we were expecting Masterpiece Theater from a Human Centipede movie, but man it was all just so bad. Then again, actors can only do so much with what they're given, so it's not really the fault of guys like Robert Lasardo or Tiny Lister that things turned out so horribly. When you look at someone like Bree Olson, who is a Porn Star by trade, and think "she's actually pretty good in this," then you know something is really wrong. That's no knock on her specifically, but she's not "really" an actress, and she was a standout here. And what Eric Roberts was doing in this movie, we have no idea. Dude was nominated for an Academy Award, and yet here he is in this shit-pile. Maybe he owed someone a favor?

YOU'RE BETTER THAN THIS, ERIC ROBERTS!

The gore is actually pretty good in this one, and is really the movie's only saving grace... although it doesn't save it at all. As violent and gory as it does get at times though, there isn't really a lot of Human Centipede action until the end of the movie. They show a lot of the cutting and sewing that creates the massive prison yard centipede, but it doesn't last all that long, and we only see the actual centipede in action for a few quick minutes. There's also a Human Caterpillar in this one, so...

MAYBE IF THE MOVIE HAD FOCUSED MORE ON BREE OLSON INSTEAD...

Tom Six should have let this series end with Part 2, and moved on to something else.

AGAIN WITH THE YELLING!

As much as we liked the first Human Centipede, and thought that the second one was at least a great gore-fest, this third, and hopefully final entry in the series leaves us wondering what in the hell happened. Maybe Tom Six had his one moment in the sun, and now he's just retreading the same old ground in far worse ways, because he's got nothing else to give us. Maybe he tried to do something radically different with this movie, and make an artistic statement of some kind. Or maybe, and this one is probably it, The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence is just a really shitty movie.

Rent it if your curiosity gets the better of you, but know that this is a massive step down in quality even from the 2nd movie in the Human Centipede series, which itself was a pretty big step down in quality from the first one. Depending on how you feel about either of those films, that's saying an awful lot.

D- (and that's being generous.)

Let's not act like Bree Olson hasn't been involved in at least one Human Centipede in her real life, alright?