Dieter Laser stars as Bill Boss, the sadistic and frankly bizarre warden of a prison whose job is skating on thin ice right now. In an attempt to run a tighter ship (or because he’s just plain sick and evil), Boss is intrigued by an idea his assistant Dwight Butler (Laurence R. Harvey) comes up with to meet Tom Six, the filmmaker behind the “Human Centipede” films. Six suggests it is ‘medically possible’ for the creation of a human centipede, and both Boss and Butler set about getting every one of the prisoners surgically attached to one another from mouth to…well, y’know. Eric Roberts turns up as a bemused Governor, whilst ‘Tiny’ Lister and Robert LaSardo play tough prison inmates.
I don’t know writer/producer/director Tom Six has done it, but this supposedly final entry into the “Human Centipede” series from 2015 is the worst one yet. Like the previous two films, this is gross just for the sake of it, but because Six has indulged lead actor Dieter Laser far too much, his idiotic rantings go on forever and ruin an already pathetic film even further. This isn’t just a ‘geek’ show, it’s a terrible one and off-the-charts bad. You really know you’re watching a crap film when Eric Roberts turns up looking embarrassed to be there and completely bemused at having to put up with Laser’s pathetic, self (over) indulgent performance.
More disgusting than the previous films but less frequently, this shoddy film throws in the basic concept in the worst, most incongruously shoehorned manner possible. Truth be told, I never really got the basic concept in the previous two films and this one doesn’t help me understand it, either. It makes no sense whatsoever why someone would want to do this very specific thing, and no, ‘because he’s nuts’ is not acceptable in my view, nor is keeping prisoners in line. It’s pointless offensiveness for its own sake rather than Six bothering to come up with a legit in-story rationale that can be taken seriously.
As I said, Laser is truly over indulged by Six in this one and gives one of the worst performances you’ll ever see in a film that also stars Eric Roberts. Coming off previously like Lance Henriksen imitating Armand Assante doing a Christopher Walken imitation with a German accent, here it’s the same thing but whilst attempting (and failing) an American accent. I’m convinced he’s speaking English phonetically and hasn’t got a clue what he’s rambling about. He and “Human Centipede II” star Laurence R. Harvey (who does a slightly better job of hiding his natural English accent than Laser with his Teutonic accent) play different characters this time out, but it’s otherwise pretty much business as usual, only worse. Harvey, by the way, seems to deliver all of his dialogue a few seconds late, making it look like the actors weren’t there at the same time and footage has been awkwardly edited by a complete hack. Did he do his entire performance via satellite? But Laser and Six are the main culprits here, stopping the narrative dead with irrelevant nonsense from Laser. Thanks to Laser’s constant shouted ramblings, the film goes nowhere at a snail’s pace. Meanwhile, perennial Steven Seagal punching bag/movie prison inmate Robert LaSardo gives the one solid performance in the film, but gets scant screen time in a film that nonetheless finds time for Laser to actually hold up the DVDs of the first two films in one completely random, shameless scene. By the way, LaSardo gets something done to him here that might actually make you faint. Even by this series’ standards, it’s really hard to watch that scene, almost as hard as watching Dieter Laser rival Nic Cage in “Deadfall” for Most Destructively Self-Indulgent Performance of All-Time.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Look, if you’re a fan of the series, you don’t need a recommendation (except maybe therapy?), and the rest of you aren’t getting one from me here. This is stupid beyond belief, and more importantly, staggeringly, self-indulgently boring. One of the worst films I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of Ed Wood’s films.
