What can only be called The Human Centipede franchise just got even more gross for its third iteration and last hurrah. Queasy though it is to admit it, there is something compelling about its extreme horror. This is because of the screaming performance of Tom Six’s star performer Dieter Laser, who has taken it to the next level. He is now even more bizarre: a colossally over-the-top turn, weirdly like Zero Mostel in The Producers, as directed by Sam Fuller.
Now he plays a megalomaniac prison boss, given to psychotic outbursts and sadistic violence, presiding over a brutal regime somewhere in the burning American desert. He has been persuaded to watch the first two Human Centipede movies and is inspired to impose discipline on his despised prisoners by sewing them up into a 500-man human centipede.
The film is of course entirely horrible and offensive, but Laser’s bulging-eyed intensity and living-skull fanaticism keeps it together. The strange thing is: he is actually quite funny. For what it’s worth, the whole thing has the true spirit of grindhouse and exploitation.
