Based on supposedly “actual accounts” that I do not believe for a second, Deliver Us from Evil casts Eric Bana (Hanna) as NYPD Sgt. Ralph Sarchie, who investigates a string of spooky shit. He and his partner, Butler (Joel McHale of TV’s Community, playing against type in a backwards ball cap and an Alice in Chains T-shirt), are left perplexed at the inhumanity they find, such as at The Bronx Zoo, where a woman quite literally has thrown her kid to the lions.

It gives nothing away to say that the crimes are linked and grow increasingly twisted — like, kitty-on-a-crucifix twisted. It gives nothing away to say that for Sarchie, these unspeakable acts take a real toll on the ol’ home life with the preggo wifey (Olivia Munn, Mortdecai). It gives nothing away — in fact, you expect it — to say that satanic forces are at work. On that note, an unconventional priest (Edgar Ramírez, The Counselor) comes to the aid of Sarchie and Butler.

Remove the ensuing exorcism angle, and Scott Derrickson’s film exudes the feel of other true-crime dramas about Big Apple law enforcement — Serpico, The Super Cops, The French Connection — in a gritty adherence to reality, especially in portraying a police career as fraught with perpetual misery. The deeper the movie dives into demonic territory, however, the more I was reminded of 1990’s The First Power, that forgettable Lou Diamond Phillips vehicle of yore.

Despite Derrickson’s previous experience with scares (Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose), Deliver Us from Evil arrives nearly empty-handed in that department. I say “nearly” because there’s this scene of a roly-poly owl stuffed animal that terrorizes Sarchie’s daughter by doing things it shouldn’t be able to do (read: move). And then there’s the soundtrack, which unloads a lot of tunes by The Doors, a band I can’t stand. In fact, The Doors’ music becomes a bona fide plot point, keeping the Jim Morrison estate awash in royalty payments. To my ears, that’s frightening. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

From the start of his highly peculiar and “100% medically accurate” franchise, writer/director/producer Tom Six promised that The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) would make the previous two films appear tame. While I disagree with that statement — for sheer gross-outs, 2011’s The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) still takes the urinal cake — Six has succeeded in making this concluding chapter as unique as II was to the 2009 original.

For this bitter-tasting end, Six goes meta, casting the madmen of parts I and II as the co-leads of III, albeit playing completely different characters who comment upon those movies and their mouth-to-anus concept as a hole. Er, excuse me: as a whole. All the action goes down (as it were) at Texas’ most inefficiently and ineffectively run penitentiary, the George H.W. Bush State Prison. That concrete jungle is ruled with a Teutonic fist by the vile, megalomaniacal Bill Boss (the first Centipede’s Dieter Laser, still channeling Christopher Walken and a lizard), a bald bully of a man who takes less pleasure in sexually harassing his secretary (porn star Bree Olson, Not Bill Cosby XXX: Puddin’ My Dick Where It Don’t Belong) than he does torturing his inmates: waterboarding, castration, breaking a guy’s “masturbation arm.”

Boss’ predilection for abuse negatively impacts the facility’s medical budget, thus annoying its roly-poly accountant, Dwight (Laurence R. Harvey, Centipede II’s miserable copycat). As a solution toward solvency, Dwight pushes Boss to consider taking a cue from the Human Centipede films and build their own 500-prisoner version as “the ultimate deterrent.” Posits Dwight, “It’s brilliant! We don’t gotta deal with their shit no more. They just gotta deal with each others’.”

That the Centipede trilogy isn’t for everyone is an understatement, but its poopy-and-goopy reputation as irredeemable trash has been overstated by those who never have seen it, never planned to and never will. As abhorrent as you think them to be — and I’m not denying their explicitness in shock value, although more goes unseen than you’d expect — there’s an art to them. Really. And it does not lie beneath the surface, either.

In this capper, what Six — who plays himself, brought in to consult for the en masse surgical procedure — has amped up is not the red-and-brown gore, but the black comedy. Every minute of this Final Sequence is played for laughs as a post-Guantanamo satire of capital punishment, criminal rehabilitation, politics for profit and, to a lesser degree, meme culture. Whereas the first film actually showed remarkable restraint (believe it), going over-the-top is entirely Six’s point here. And the point is more than made; the message is impossible to miss. That it is told with jokes about stoma and Chron’s disease attached is … well, “brave” is one word for it.

With Final Sequence’s final sequence, the trilogy achieves closure, even if that leaves us with an infinite loop. And sew it goes … —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.