The Horror Show
The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)
by Tom Six
Little known fact about myself, The Human Centipede franchise is one of my favorite film series. Upon release of the first film, I expressed interest in watching the film to my college roommate. I will never forget his response, “Don’t watch it. The entire movie you’re rooting for the victims’ escape but [the human centipede] happens.” In that moment, I knew that I had to watch it. That movie was such a downer and so depressing, it was fantastic. The real magic came with The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), it was the first film to actually disturb and offend me. I had not once, prior to watching The Human Centipede 2, ever questioned why I was watching such a grotesque movie. I even debated turning it off at one point. For that movie to have such an effect on a person makes it great and memorable. Since seeing the second movie, I have been waiting patiently for The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) and now finally it’s been released on VOD services like Amazon Prime.
The third movie opens similarly to the second. The final moments of the second film roll until it cuts to two men watching it on DVD. The men are Bill Boss, a prison warden, and his accountant, Dwight Butler. The prison is faced with exceptionally high rates of violence which also leads to outrageous medical costs; essentially the prison is failing. Butler thinks the solution lies in creating the human centipede as the ultimate crime deterrent. Boss on the other hand thinks it’s just a stupid movie, he believes that medieval forms of torture are the key to prisoner rehabilitation. He breaks a prisoner’s arm and pours boiling water over the face of another, all in an effort to get them to behave. While those previous attempts failed, his final effort lies in mass castrations of all prisoners. He performs one as an experiment but, to no surprise, it didn’t work. Meeting the prisoners with violence only make them more angry and aggressive. Butler convinces Tom Six, the director of the film franchise, to meet Boss. Tom Six and the prison’s doctor go over the medical reports with Bill and verify that the human centipede surgery is 100% medically accurate. This convinces Boss that the only way to save the Prison is to make a 500 person long human centipede.
This film is easily the worst of all The Human Centipede movies. It’s so laughable. I think what made the other films great is that they took themselves seriously even though they dealt with ridiculous subject matter. I think what really does this movie in is that it tries too hard to be offensive. In the first five minutes, Boss make sexist remarks to his secretary and then proceeds to finger her right in front of his accountant. Another such incident lies with an inmate with a colostomy; Boss sticks his gun into the stoma and pulls the trigger. This creates an explosion of blood and feces everywhere. My final example of this lies in the fact that the prison inmates constantly threaten to rape Bill Boss to death. That’s right, rape him to death. If you were wondering exactly what it means to rape someone to death, don’t worry, the movie shows us. Basically it involves shanking someone in the kidney and doing them in the gaping wound. Yep. That’s all I can say. Yep. It honestly felt like this movie wasn’t even made by Tom Six, but instead by Uwe Boll. That’s how laughable and bad this movie was at trying to be offensive.
Also if you really wanted to get a good in-depth look at the 500 person human centipede (called in the movie, “the human prison centipede,” totally not catchy by the way) you won’t get it here. They don’t even start the surgery till about an hour into the movie. The other movies really show off detail when it comes to the surgeries, this one doesn’t even do that. You just get one quick glimpse and in that time you get to see a very detailed shot of someone getting their anus wiped. Yep, that’s also something that happens. At least we get to plenty of time to see the human prison centipede in action right? Nope, once assembled it literally just sits there, it doesn’t move or anything. Everyone just walks around it and talks about it. Then Bill Boss just wipes the centipede’s butt. I think Six has an obsession with wiping people’s butts. Anyways, that was most anti-climactic build up to a human centipede ever. The movie also introduces the human caterpillar, I won’t go into details as to what that is, but I’ll just say it’s as anti-climactic as the human prison centipede was.
The movie features a huge series of plot holes wider than the Grand Canyon. But before I go further, I will be talking about some plot elements here so I’m giving a spoiler warning. My personal favorite plot hole lies in Butler’s murder. Bill Boss kills Dwight because the human prison centipede was Butler’s idea. However, Boss wants the credit and shoots Butler in the head to keep that a secret. Boss then proceeds to wipe his finger prints off the gun and places the gun in Butler’s hand to make it look like a suicide. Despite this, the warden also murdered the prison doctor moments before, and countless prison inmates before that. However, this particular murder is the one he makes look like suicide. Somehow Boss was able to keep the other murders under wraps, or no one really seemed to care he was murdering people all willy-nilly. Another huge plot hole was why was Boss’s secretary, Daisy, integrated into the human centipede? The movie never addresses whether she was integrated by accident or on purpose. When Boss is questioned about it he kind of bullshits an answer, making it further unclear if he’s trying to cover his tracks or because he really doesn’t know. However, I think it’s something that the movie does need to address.
One thing this movie taught me is that Tom Six thinks very highly of himself. Anytime someone mentions The Human Centipede in the film everyone just talks about how great those movies are. He also portrays himself in a very favorable light such as people asking for his autograph, and he’s so charitable by granting their request. The character of Tom Six even throws up upon witnessing the human caterpillar, I’m not sure what he was trying to say here, but it was extremely cocky. I feel like Tom Six was riding his high created by the first two movies and that lead to the downfall of the third. Basically, he abandoned everything that made the first two films successful and tried doing something new. He probably had this feeling of immortality and he boldly ventured into new territory, when he should have treaded lightly. Starting the third movie in the exact same way he started the second was pure laziness. I was honestly hoping for a more clever way for him to tie all three films together. When he did it in the second movie it was clever, when he did it again it was tiring. I’m kind of glad that this will be the last film in the franchise because I can’t bear the thought of anymore movies ruining the name of the franchise. I was on my hands and knees waiting for the movie to come out and now I can’t get the taste of shit left in my mouth by The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence).
Billy Wayne Martin, HMS
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