The “reprehensible, dismaying, ugly” movie that earned Roger Ebert’s last zero-star review
Relative to the number of movies he watched, Roger Ebert didn’t dish out too many zero-star reviews. It was a special circle of hell he reserved for the worst of the worst, and only a tiny percentage fit the bill.
The critic’s earliest recorded zero-star rating was awarded to the 1966 docudrama, Africa Addio, and he despised everything else made by its directors, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E Prosperi. He dished out his last in October 2011, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer film, if by nicer you mean disgusting.
Of the 10,000 or so pictures he cast his analytical eyes over, only around 60 of them failed to muster even half a star. In an exceedingly rare case, the last picture to earn a thumbs-down from Ebert was the sequel to an opening instalment that received zero stars, statistically making it the worst movie series he ever watched.
A lot of people would agree with him, too, since the overriding sentiment surrounding Tom Six’s Human Centipede trilogy was complete and utter what the fuckery. For some reason, the filmmaker, a term we use very loosely, conjured an idea about sewing people arse-to-mouth for a sick experiment, and for whatever reason, he was given the money to do it three times.
While it should be mentioned that some horror aficionados did enjoy the triptych, the general audience did not. Having already suffered through The Human Centipede, Ebert would have known what he was letting himself in for when the follow-up was gearing up to be released, which prepared him to unleash both barrels on a sorry excuse for cinema.
“The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless, and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency,” he declared. The plot, if you can even call it that, ventured into self-referential territory, with Laurence R Harvey’s Martin Lomax becoming so obsessed with The Human Centipede that he decided to create one of his own, except bigger, easily defeating Six’s initial arse-to-mouth ratio.
He couldn’t quite comprehend why Ashlynn Yennie had agreed to return for the sequel, either. Was she so short of offers in the aftermath of the first Human Centipede that the only way she could return to the screen was to play herself in the second one and have the exact same fate befall her? She’s maintained a career ever since, but at the time, Ebert wasn’t sure if she would.
“I am left with this question,” he pondered. “After Ashlynn Yennie’s first movie role was in the first Human Centipede movie, and now her second is in Human Centipede 2, do you think she’ll leave showbusiness?” She did not, but you can understand why he thought that maybe she would, or should.
Ebert’s review of the affronting, offending, and stomach-churning picture was written in October 2011, 18 months before his death at the age of 70. He may have loathed every second of it, and it might not be how he wanted things to go, but it’ll be remembered as his final zero-star appraisal either way.
