Life is cheap and the production value cheaper in The Human Centipede 3 trailer

Despite the original’s slick veneer, The Human Centipede series has always, at its heart, been about nothing more than eating poop. Other people’s poop, specifically, because we all know people who aren’t ourselves eat lots of gross stuff like cuttlefish and asparagus. Not that eating your own poop would be much better…

See, that’s how quickly the conversation devolves when you’re talking about The Human Centipede. Believe it or not, this simplistic gross-out premise has carried The Human Centipede through to its third installment, which overcame some suspiciously headline-baiting production problems and gathered up 500 willing extras to don orange prison jumpsuits and form the chain that is the raison d’être for these films in the summer of 2013.

Two years later, The Human Centipede 3 finally (?) has a release date, and now a red-band trailer to go with it. The trailer confirms that, like The Human Centipede 2, The Human Centipede 3 will take a meta approach to its material, as prisoners about to suffer the same disgusting fate freak out watching clips from the first two Human Centipede movies. It also confirms that Dieter Laser, having failed in his attempts to open a chain of laser-tag facilities in Argentina, has returned as the diabolical Bill Boss, who has moved to what looks like Southern California to create his biggest human centipede yet. Why? Probably some kind of metaphor for the prison-industrial complex.

Finally, the trailer confirms that director Tom Six did not have a very big budget for this production. That’s obvious in a scene that takes place in the warden’s office at this very experimental prison, featuring adult actress Bree Olson and The Human Centipede 2 star Laurence R. Harvey on what appears to be a leftover set from Sharknado 3. Eric Roberts is also there as Governor Hughes, a role he presumably filmed in between reshoots for A Talking Cat?! or any other of the dozens of movies he makes each year.

The Human Centipede 3 is subtitled Final Sequence, meaning that this should be the last time Tom Six inflicts a Human Centipede movie upon the world. Then again, Six hasn’t made a single non-Human Centipede film since the first one came out in 2009, so look for The Human Centipede 4 (Final Final Sequence), in which Six recreates Hands Across America, but by sewing people’s mouths to other people’s butts, sometime in, oh, let’s say 2018.