Notorious gross-out horror movie franchise The Human Centipede has reached a new low with the third film, according to critics.
Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) has had its review embargo lifted and the news is not good for Dutch filmmaker Tom Six.
His infamous trilogy centres on the gimmick of a madman sewing multiple people together, mouth-to-anus, to create a singular digestive tract.
The first film played at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2010 and, despite largely negative reviews, became a cult hit.
The second was far more extreme, graphically rubbing audience's faces in the shocking content that what was generally only hinted at in the first film. It was banned in many countries, including New Zealand, had worse reviews and saw even fans of the original saying they hated it.
Apparently, things have gotten worse.
"Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than The Human Centipede II," writes Chuck Bowen for Slant Magazine.
"The sequels aren't merely deliberately bad, but claustrophobically contemptuous of their audience, daring us to somehow not hate them and the smorgasbord of jokey racism, sexism, castration, rape, dismemberment, and, of course, the now de rigueur ass-to-mouth shenanigans that they offer up for our anti-delectation."
"What started as Six's inept attempt to push the boundaries of extreme horror - 'Sorry, buddy', reply the French and the Japanese - has developed into a 4chan-level trolling exercise that's sustained by curiosity-seekers and withering zero-star reviews from publications such as this one," writes Scott Tobias for The Dissolve.
"They're feel-bad experiences that have felt worse with each 'sequence'. Give them no oxygen, and they'll die."
"Six just wants to shock, though his imagination is so primitive that the effort is strained and a bit pathetic," writes Variety's Dennis Harvey, who condescendingly adds: "Of course, that will only heighten its curiosity value among the usual seekers of lowest-level genre excess."
But hardcore horror websites aren't much less scathing of the film.
"Six focusing so hard on being politically offensive [means] that there's not much time devoted to being disturbing," writes Brad Miska for BloodyDisgusting.com.
"The only thing shocking about Human Centipede III is how tame it was ... after years of being playfully assaulted by Six, this time he's delivered something that's 100% boring."
Staci Layne Wilson of Dread Central says the film is "cinematically constipated… nothing happens for a long, long time and when it does it's just crap."
The third film currently has a Metacritic rating of just 6 percent, while the second has 17 and the first 33.
Six himself has responded to the negative reviews with a series of tweets:
Pede 3 and myself piss so many people off. The more one is hated, the happier one is! X
— Tom Six (@tom_six) May 20, 2015
The importance of a movie is defined by the amount of harm that is spoken of it!
— Tom Six (@tom_six) May 20, 2015
A lot of journalists canceled their interviews with me today cause they hated pede 3 hahahahahahahahahaha
— Tom Six (@tom_six) May 20, 2015
There are no announced plans for the release of Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) in New Zealand.
3 News
source: newshub archive
