By Tristan Bishop
The Human Centipede films (of which this third segment is surely the final installment) have surely had one of the strangest progressions in the history of film. From 2009’s Human Centipede: First Sequence, which, despite the buzz generated by the uniquely disgusting premise (I’m sure there isn’t a soul reading this that isn’t aware of the nature of the centipede), and a great performance from Dieter Laser as Dr Heiter, turned out to be a standard mad doctor film with very little in the way of subtext, to the grossly comedic and nightmarish sequel of 2011’s Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, which featured a wonderfully repulsive central turn from Laurence R Harvey and came across as a self-referential treatise on the idea of ‘harm’ from watching horror films. That Full Sequence garnered so much disgust and was banned in the UK (albeit briefly, and finally passed with a total of thirty cuts) could be testament to how well it works as, variously, a comment on film censorship itself, a middle finger to the critics, and, at the film’s basest level, a truly grim gorefest. When word came out regarding The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence, those who had seen the previous two were wondering quite where director Tom Six was going to be able to take this one.
Well, this is one strange film indeed. Where the second film was so removed from the original’s slow, eerie feel, bringing instead a monochrome realism to proceedings which brought to mind nothing less than David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Final Sequence comes on like Fellini remaking the 1988 Chinese gorefest Men Behind The Sun. This film is bold, brash, and (somewhat ironically for a film set in a prison), takes no prisoners.
Laser and Harvey both appear in this film – both playing completely different characters to the ones they portrayed in the previous instalments. Rather than the quiet, obsessive doctor of the original, Laser here stars as the amusingly named ‘Bill Boss’, a psychotic, foul-mouthed, unpredictably violent German-American in charge of a correctional facility, whilst Harvey plays his long-suffering accountant, Dwight Butler, who is trying to convince Boss, via DVDs of the first two films, that the concept of the Human Centipede will be the next big thing in crime prevention – after all, if prison doesn’t work, surely being part of a 500-man centipede will scare criminals straight?
Boss is not remotely interested in ‘this B-movie crap’ to start with – preferring to spend his days sexually abusing his scantily-clad secretary Daisy (former adult star Bree Olson) whom he charmingly refers to as ‘tits’, torturing the prisoners in ever more inventive ways (“boiling waterboarding! Guantanamo style!”) and constantly spewing (well, screaming, actually) a torrent of racist, sexist and just downright vile dialogue. Eventually Butler manages to bring in Tom Six himself, in an audacious fourth-wall-breaking move, to convince Boss of the ‘100% medically accurate’ claim so famously used as the tag line for the original film, and they conspire together to create the world’s first coprophagic chain gang.
HC3 is a very hard film to like, and this has been reflected in critical response to it so far – it currently holds a score of 1% on Metacritic, which is a pretty impressive achievement in itself. To call it uneven would be a massive understatement. Laser’s dialogue (and he dominates the film) is nearly all screamed out loud in his heavy German accent, and whilst the performance is pretty impressive stuff for a physically-slight 73 year old, it gets wearing very, very quickly. Harvey’s performance meanwhile is so wooden (his broad American accent constantly going wonky) that it must have been intentional, especially given his brilliance in the previous film. Oscar-nominee Eric Roberts (?!?) plays it straight as a visiting governor who is aiming to shut down the pair’s activities, and only Olson really delivers a sensitive and likeable performance, despite being treated like a piece of meat by Boss. The script, when it isn’t being rendered unintelligible by screaming or awful accents, is mostly an excuse to spew taboo-busting dialogue or set up a scene of torture and degradation, and the film runs out of steam way before they get to the centipede – in fact it’s obvious by this point that Six isn’t really interested in the titular creation at all this time around.
There’s a line of dialogue near the end of the film that gives the game away for me – Laser says/screams ‘I don’t want ANYONE to like this’. He’s referring to the centipede, of course, but one also feels this is Tom Six speaking about the film – He has gone out to make a film which is so meticulous in trying to offend everyone that it works – Not just in, say, sexist, racist or violent content (which is actually so liberally applied as to hardly be offensive at all) but also in terms of it being a massive ‘screw you’ not just to critics of the first two films, but also those who championed them. Anyone expecting a tonal continuation of the previous Centipede movies will instead be faced with a scattershot satire on right wing American politics which feels like being smashed over the head with a fridge whilst an old man shouts at you.
So on one hand we have to hand it to Six; he’s made a film that not even a mother could love, one where any sick enjoyment of the on-screen antics (and I did laugh several times in the first half hour before boredom took over) will be crushed by the weight of its own extremity. Impressive in its ballsy attitude, but impossible to enjoy, it will certainly ensure that fans are not clamouring for part 4 any time soon.
The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence comes to Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on 13th July, from Monster Pictures.