Several years ago, I was dared to watch The Human Centipede and I did. I wrote up a fairly decent review of it, and called it a day. If I remember correctly, I found it boring and its attempts to shock the audience both desperate and not that effective.
Sometime later, I was dared to watch The Human Centipede 2 and I did. I wasn’t writing reviews at the time as I was burned out and was taking a long sabbatical so I don’t have a specific review of the movie to point to, but as my pained memories have painted it, Part two was even more desperate than the first movie going from being unpleasant to watch to being an active punishment on the audience as if the movie had developed some sort of consciousness and that new sentient mind hated the people watching it and sought to make them suffer.
Needless to say, The Human Centipede 2 is probably somewhere on my list of the worst movies I’ve ever seen not because of its excessive gore or torture, but because it’s so boring and desperately determined to make the audience throw up.
Nobody dared me to watch The Human Centipede 3. I’m not friends with that group anymore… that ended when they dared me to watch Part 2 because how dare they? I decided to finish this trilogy on my own because I’m a masochist apparently and feel I should be punished.
The Human Centipede 3 takes place in a badly run prison where the inmates are running rampant and the warden is a neurotic sociopath who delights in sexually harassing his secretary and humiliating and dehumanizing his accountant. The warden and the accountant, incidentally, are played by Dieter Laser, the mad scientist from the first movie, and Laurence R. Harvey who played the pervert in the second movie.
I guess this is The Avengers of The Human Centipede films only without the demand for it, the fun, and all of that other stuff.
The accountant shows the warden the first two Human Centipede movies and convinces him that stringing all of the prison’s inmates together bum to mouth would solve all of the prison’s problems and, like any rational man would, the warden goes along with it.
If I had to come up with a word to adequately describe the experience of sitting through this movie, it wouldn’t be “gross” or “disgusting,” though those words are accurate in many ways, it would (and forgive me for using this word again) “desperate.” Tom Six has sewn together a movie so desperate to invoke feelings of disgust that I honestly believe that it ceases being a torture porn and turns into some sort of a weird absurdist comedy. If I thought it was actually done on purpose (which, in all fairness, it might actually have been), I would be congratulating Mr. Six, but I don’t think it was… I think it happened by accident. I think that the desperation to make this the grossest of the three movies, to the point of even making the Warden a cartoony overacting clown that you can’t even look at without shuttering a little bit on the inside, turned this entire film into an unintentional farce. For goodness sake, Tom Six himself shows up at one point playing himself offering tips to the warden and accountant about how to make the centipede and the cameo is just dripping in narcissism and self-congratulation that even M. Night Shamalyan thinks he should tone it down a notch.
The Human Centipede 3 is just another movie that is so bad and weird that just watching it feels like a thankless job. It’s not really that shocking, it’s all been done before, and none of it can be taken seriously because, whether intentional or not, the movie can’t stick to a genre. Is it horror? Is it comedy? Is it a commentary? It’s so clumsy that it’s hard to tell minute by minute.
The Human Centipede 3 is Saw if it was made by 5th grade boys. It’s juvenile, it’s stupid, it’s smarmy, and it’s just annoying. Dieter Laser’s acting is so over the top and loud that it alone just about makes the movie unwatchable and I have never, repeat: never said that about an actor before. I have never seen a single actor completely destroy a movie, but I’ll be darned if Dieter Laser didn’t do it.
I’m not sure that it was intentional, but it’s there.
I don’t hate this movie… it’s actually too weird to hate. Personally, I would have loved to have been behind the scenes for this making of this movie just so I could have seen the mindset that went into the construction of this beast.
If I were to describe my experience watching the final Human Centipede movie, it would be… annoyed. I’m so annoyed by it. Everything about it was annoying. It was an immature attempt to gross out the audience and somehow, it failed on every… single… possible… level.
Either Tom Six is a madman who destroyed his own movie or he’s a genius who destroyed his own movie. Only Tom Six knows the answer for certain.
Jason Gaston 