Ruptured Review: The Human Centipede 3 [Final Sequence]

Country of origin- USA 

Year of release- 2015  

Director- Tom Six   

Stars- Dieter Laser, Laurence R. Harvey, Tom Six, Bree Olson, Eric Roberts                                            

It is a first for me to review a sequel without first discussing its predecessors, but I feel that the phenomena that is the Human Centipede films, particularly 1&2 almost does not need an introduction as the majority of people reading this will have already seen them.

This film begins where Full Sequence left off, and we see in typical Tom Six style it that it was in fact a film within a film, and that First Sequence is now a film within a film, within a film. As the credits roll on Full Sequence we see that it is being watched by Bill Boss (Dieter Laser) the governor of maximum security prison bound by barren desert somewhere in The United States. He has been made to watch it, and First Sequence, as part of a proposal by his accountant Dwight Butler (Laurence R. Harvey) to try and come up with a solution to the prison’s failure, both economic and internal. But Bill Boss refuses to listen to the proposal, and instead decides to reduce violence amongst prisoners through various barbaric and sadist tortures, including boiling water boarding and castration. But when these foul methods fail to control the prisons population and the ever increasingly deranged Bill Boss’s job hangs in the balance he turns to the advice of his accountant and Tom Six who plays himself. Eventually it is decided that the most cost effective way to reduce disobedience amongst prisoners is to create a 500 person human prison centipede.

This film had a lot of potential to fail miserably, but I am almost joyful when I say to you that it most certainly did not! This has to be the most outrageously over the top, batshit crazy, revolting, pitch black comedic horror film I have ever seen. And in my mind that is down to two people, the first being Tom Six who wrote and directed the film with what appears to be an almost manic energy that seeps from the screen and chokes the audience. His writing is frankly superb when it comes to the most “shocking” and “offensive” scenes in the film, which includes such gems as the line “Thank god for female circumcision” as the Bill Boss character holds a jar of dried clitorises which he proceeds to snack from.

This brings me on to the second person who is as important to the film as Tom Six in my opinion, and that is of course the brilliant Dieter Laser who plays one of the most insane characters to ever grace our screens. His unpredictable manic sadism is intoxicating to the viewer, as we see him delivering some of the most bizarre and deranged lines I have ever heard. His performance is frankly unmatchable in this film, and I say that with a great deal of respect towards Laurence R. Harvey who delivers a good performance as the down trodden, yet psychotic Dwight Butler.

However, putting aside the superb writing and acting for just a moment let me address why this film in my opinion has been so poorly received amongst not only critics, but many horror fans around the world. It is because this film is essentially the result of the abyss staring back as Nietzsche would have put it. This film takes the darkest core of humanity and shows it to the audience and laughs at just how ludicrous it is, and it does this with a concept so vile that all you can do is to laugh along with it. And it is this idea that so many people simply haven’t understood, and have instead interpreted the film as nothing more than trash. This film needs to be essential viewing for everybody and I wholeheartedly recommend it until I’m blue in the face. The Human Centipede 3 [Final Sequence] gets a 9/10 from me, it has to be seen to be believed.                                                       

Ruptured Review: Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead

Country of origin- Australia 
Year of release- 2015 (UK)  
Director- Kiah Roache-Turner   
Stars- Jay Gallagher, Bianca Brodly, Leon Burchill, Luke McKenzie

Because this film is still fairly new, and subsequently most people won’t have had a chance to have seen it yet, I will throughout this review be keeping the plot description to a bare minimum in order to prevent any spoilers.

The film focuses on a mechanic called Barry who finds himself struggling to survive after a meteor shower leave’s most of the population as deranged flesh hungry zombies. After Barry attempts to escape his suddenly besieged home with his wife and young daughter, which ends in tragedy, Barry eventually teams up with three other survivors in an attempt to find his sister Brook and save her from the ever growing zombie horde. However the group realise that getting to her isn’t going to be as easy as they once thought, as it seems that the same meteor shower that caused the zombie outbreak has also somehow neutralised all flammable liquids such as petrol, thus leaving them with no way to power their pickup truck. But Barry eventually realises that both the blood of the zombies and the strange gas that they exhale is very flammable and can be used to power now armoured pickup truck and take the group to safety and his sister.

Considering this film took four years to make and was shot entirely on weekends so as not to interrupt the work schedules of the cast and crew, and was crafted with a fairly modest budget, this film is astonishingly well made. Everything from the stunning cinematography of Tim Nagle, to the surprisingly good quality acting of almost the entire cast felt like something from a far higher budget feature. But the success of this film can be put down to three main components.

Firstly, the filmmakers took the time to actually create characters that you didn’t wish a horrible death upon within five minutes, and unlike most modern zombie films the characters were given interesting and at times tragic backstories that made the audience actually give a damn about them. Secondly, the filmmakers got a perfect blend of over the top gore and comedic writing that gave the film a fresh and constantly vibrant feel that is so rarely seen in the horror genre today. And finally, possibly the most important component this film contains is that the people who made it actually gave a shit. So often we are bludgeoned half to death with horror films that were made for one reason alone, to make money, this is thankfully not one of them. The filmmakers behind Wyrmwood display genuine passion for the genre and the film is littered with clever references to films such as Evil Dead, Braindead and Mad Max that show real understanding of this films origins.

To say that I recommend this film doesn’t really do it justice, for fans of zombie action cinema this is a must and it will not disappoint those with a keen eye for the genre, it gets 8/10 from me.                                

Ruptured Review: Anthropophagus

Country of origin- Italy
Year of release- 1980  
Director- Joe D'Amato 
Stars- Tisa Farrow, Saverio Vallone, George Eastman 

To celebrate this film’s 35^th anniversary, and its recent fully uncut Blu-Ray and DVD release in the UK by 88 Films I think it is time to review one of the most important Italian horror films of the 80s.

The film begins with a young couple walking on the beach of a small archipelago island, the two of them stop by a large rock and the woman decides to take a swim, leaving her boyfriend to listen to his incredibly oversized headphones. It isn’t long before the young woman is dragged below the water’s surface never to be seen again. We then see a point of view shot from whatever killed her, which is now heading towards her boyfriend who proceeds to have a rather head on meeting with a large meat clever. The film then cuts to a group of friends who have hired a boat and plan to travel around archipelago islands. The first island they land on almost immediately rings alarm bells for the group as the island’s small village seems to be completely deserted and the islands only line of outside communication has been destroyed. As they search the village for any signs of life they find a badly decomposed mostly eaten human cadaver, and decide to get the hell out of dodge. However, when they get back to the boat they find to their dismay that is now drifting out to sea, leaving them stranded on the deserted island with way to call for help. And it isn’t long before the bodies begin to mount up as a deranged cannibal mercilessly stalks his prey and uses their flesh to feed his perverse hunger.

It is hard to believe in this day an age that when this film was first released in the UK on VHS, it was thought by the moral crusaders of the time to be an actual snuff film. It is due to this reputation as a shockingly sick and demented film that would likely turn all who saw it into gore hungry serial killing perverts, that got it placed on the now infamous “Video Nasty” list. How anybody could have thought that the cheap and cheesy gore and splatter that this film has to offer was real, is beyond me.

This film is a perfect example of why 1980’s Italian horror is for me the best kind of horror. It has everything I look for in a horror film, it has a simple yet effective plot that makes sense and doesn’t leave you feeling like you have be in some way cheated. It has a solid amount of practical gore, including the now legendry foetus eating scene that continues to shock audiences even today, along with the equally infamous self-disembowelment scene. And it has silly dubbing and an often poorly timed synth soundtrack that sounds like something from a bootleg Clockwork Orange rip-off. Combine these elements together and you have yourself a 90 minute festival of Italian brilliance that had me smiling like an idiot from start to finish. Overall I highly recommend this film, It’s frankly pretty hard to go wrong with a film that features the great George Eastman eating babies and terrorizing the blind, this classic gets a 8/10 from me, check it out.      

Ruptured Review: Sexandroide

Country of origin- France 
Year of release- 1987  
Director- Michel Ricaud 
Stars- Daniel Dubois

The film begins with a tell-tale sign of quality that haunts many a no-budget 80’s film, and that is the grainy blur of a VHS camera and the oh so irritating static hiss of the tape, of which I’m sadly too familiar with. The first scene begins with a man sitting in a basement, at a table littered with some kind of voodoo paraphernal including a doll and a photograph of a young woman. We than see this young woman in ladies restroom of some kind of dingy bar. It is at this moment that the man in the basement begins to strip the clothes off the voodoo doll of the young woman and we are then treated to a very long shot of her being stripped nude by some kind of unseen force. This scene is executed with all the skill of a dead skunk, as the “unseen force” is clearly someone just out of frame pulling half-heartedly at her clothes. Once she is nude the man in the basement then does something I am still trying to fathom. He sticks a large pin between the dolls legs, and seems to induce the now nude woman’s period! Which, to my great surprise she seems to enjoy immensely. After this, the man in the basement begins to slowly kill her, first by stabbing the dolls eyes and then eventually slitting its throat, which in turn kills the young woman in the toilets.

The film then moves on to its next story which is even more bizarre and features a large pale faced man flogging a very excited woman in some kind of crypt. This story does have a very Devils Experiment/Flowers of Flesh and Blood feel to it, which gave it a very nasty grimy feel which was added to by the low quality picture, sound and dubbing. The final story is the most boring and the tamest, it simply features a woman who is stripped nude and bitten by a vampire, and then feels the need to gyrate and grind her way around his tomb for about 10 minutes before hopping in the coffin with him for what I presume will be some fanged fun.

          

This film could best be categorised as an anthology horror/softcore S&M porno film, with a touch of the surreal and a load of shoddy gore. Although really describing it as a film to begin with isn’t really that accurate, it generally fells more like a grotty modern art installation. To be honest it’s hard to really discuss this film as there is literally no dialogue, just the most poorly dubbed moans and screams you can imagine. There is also no plot, not even a hint. And don’t even get me started on the z grade acting and cinematography. Frankly if you want to see huge amounts of strange fetishized gore and full frontal nudity by the bucket load then this will be right up your rather twisted street. However if you’re looking for a good film, look elsewhere. This gets a ?/10 from me, because this isn’t a film, it’s just weird old French porn of the kind you find on 8mm rolls of film in safety deposit boxes.       

Ruptured Review: Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America

Country of origin- USA
Year of release- 2007 
Director- Tony Stone 
Stars- Fiore Tedesco, Tony Stone, David Perry

The film begins with a passage of text which explains some background to the story we are about to see. It says that in 1007 AD a Viking expedition from Greenland travelled west in search of new lands (North America). They eventually arrived at Leifsbudir, and then finding the land was barren and desolate travelled down the coast to Vinland, where they set up camp and send out two pathfinders into the forest. Soon after this, the landing party falls foul of the Skraelings (natives) and many are killed leaving the rest to flee in the boat assuming the pathfinders are dead, however they are not.

The film then begins and the first thing we see is the two pathfinders, Orn and Volnard and some very annoying shaky-cam that nearly gave me an aneurism. The two pathfinders find their dead comrades and the boat gone, and decide to head further into the forest so they are less exposed to any potential Skraelings. Once in the forest, Chapter 1- Stranded begins, and yes in case you were wondering this is indeed the kind of film that is divide into chapters, which immediately rings alarm bells of pretentiousness for me. After building a shelter, which is done in what feels like real time, the two begin to hunt for food. The next day we are greeted to some actual unstimulated woodland shitting from one of the pathfinders, because that’s what this film really needed. After what feels like a further ten hours, the pathfinders find a small log cabin inhabited by two monks and proceed to kill one of them, and soon after this we see a real chicken beheading, which is completely unneeded and pretty unpleasant. It is at this point in the film that the two pathfinders begin to follow separate paths, one beginning a spiritual quest with the surviving monk, and the other slowly reverting to a more primal state.

This film had a great deal of potential to create a beautiful, dark, charismatic and intelligent classical Norse saga. However, it failed in this task, and instead created a boring film with one dimensional characters portrayed by below average actors and a pretentious and paper thin plot that would fail to hold the attention of even the most invested cinema enthusiast. The film also suffered the sadly inescapable problem of having a very low budget, and the slightly more escapable issue of piss poor cinematography that would be at times baffling and at others sickening. This film did have one very strong redeeming feature, and that was its soundtrack, which was comprised of mostly atmospheric and raw black metal from such bands as Burzum and Dimmu Borgir which were often well suited to the bleak forest landscape that was the film’s setting. This brings me to my conclusion that this film is essentially a string of sub-par black metal music videos that have been strung together by an ostentatious director to created what I have seen described as a “visual poem”, but what is in actuality a dull ego trip for a black metal fan. If you want to see a film that is similar to this but actually good, I recommend Valhalla Rising as it explores many of the concepts that flew over this films head in a much darker and more innovative way. Severed Ways gets a 3/10 from me, I can’t really recommend it, just listen to its soundtrack.