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.

At least one positive emerged from the heavy-metal hysteria of the ’80s: We got a pretty goofy movie satirizing the whole thing — albeit at featherweight — in Trick or Treat. Directed by actor Charles Martin Smith (1987’s The Untouchables), the schlocky Dino De Laurentiis production centers on the kind of misfit teen Smith became famous for playing in George Lucas’ American Graffiti. That 1973 film’s nerdy Toad may as well be this 1986 film’s Eddie.

But the part belongs to Marc Price, then still ripe in his second-banana role as Skippy on TV’s Family Ties. Eddie wouldn’t dare sit near Skippy on the bus, but both are outcasts all the same. Eddie’s attic room is practically wallpapered with posters of the hair-metal bands in which he finds escape from daily abuse by preppy bully Tim (Doug Savant, the token gay of TV’s Melrose Place), but outright worship is reserved for Satan-loving singer Sammi Curr (former Solid Gold dancer Tony Fields). Moments after writing Curr a gushing fan letter, which he signs “Ragman,” Eddie learns via the TV news that his idol has perished in a hotel fire. Bummed out, Eddie seeks solace in the local rock DJ (Kiss front man Gene Simmons, sans makeup), who gifts the boy with a valuable slab of vinyl: the only pressing of Curr’s Songs in the Key of Death.

Playing the record from “rock’s chosen warrior” backward, Eddie not only hears personal messages from Curr emanating through his stereo speakers — he summons him from the dead! With half his mug burned and blistered, but spiked mullet intact, the resurrected Curr looks like Two-Face for the Kerrang! set. At first he helps Eddie exact revenge through high-school high jinks, but quickly takes things too far; the best example gives us Trick or Treat’s most memorable scene: Tim’s girlfriend (Elise Richards, Valet Girls) being stripped, fondled and plateaued by green mist swirling from a Walkman playing Curr’s lost album on cassette. Is it live or is it Memorex? (The second most memorable bit is Savant’s near-tears line reading in the aftermath: “He put Genie in the hospital with his voodoo witchcraft! Or whatever the hell it is!” Trust me: You gotta be there.)

Bearing only a minimal connection to the title-tied holiday of Halloween, Trick or Treat aims for subversion by casting metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, a real-life target of the Parents Music Resource Center, as a man of the cloth preaching against the evils of rock ’n’ roll, yet the movie goes no further than that. All the time Smith and the script spent trying to turn Curr into the next Freddy Krueger (by way of Penelope Spheeris) should have been invested in making our supposed hero more than a petulant mouth-breather, coming up with more imaginative ways for Eddie and his crush (Lisa Orgolini, Born to Ride) to defeat Curr than the ol’ laundry hamper/flushed toilet combo, and writing a conclusion that wrapped up well before Trick enters a cycle of repetition — or, as the music industry calls it, heavy rotation. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.