Author Archives: Jayson Gallaway

June 4, 2025

Well, shit, dear reader…no point in trying to ignore it anymore…it’s my birthday. For the record, I hate my birthday and think that, like all birthdays past the age of 21, it is a completely pointless thing to acknowledge. Which opinion I made most crystalline to Mgmt on this morning’s call. But they were, as usual, insistent.
“I don’t even want to acknowledge my birthday, let alone write about it,” I said with all the authority I could muster at 06:00.
“Your readers want to know about you. They want to celebrate things like your birthday.” Which is simply bullshit of the lowest order. “Let them think I was created in a lab,” I told them, already fairly drunk for that time of morning.
I know you don’t think I was created in a lab, dear reader, but I also know that adults who put significant emphasis on their birthdays, especially men, come across as, well, rather pathetic and weird to the rest of the adults who have been far too busy with real concerns to worry about anyone’s random-ass birthday for decades.
I don’t mean to be a killjoy, another curmudgeon yelling at the damn kids to get off his lawn and please, dear God, quit singing Happy Birthday at him. [Note to self: the lyrics to that insipid fucking song should be changed to “Happy birthday at you.” Because that’s really what’s going on here. Most people over the age of 30, certainly 35, would really rather you not make any kind of big deal about it. After a certain point, the “celebratory” nature decreases to almost nil, and birthdays become rather brutal and cruel reminders another year of the rapidly decreasing number of years we have in this life is gone forever. The Clock is ticking, and there is no denying that the hour is growing late.
Of course, I know people are just trying to be nice. It’s the one day out of the year when people are comfortable telling you that they’re glad you’re around. And that’s great. But a simple, maybe, dare I wish, discreet “Happy Birthday,” is plenty. But I get it…and despite whatever bluster you read here, being wished happy birthday doesn’t actually make me conniptive or cause me to launch a cake in anger. I like being Happy Birthdayed as much as anyone else.
I guess it’s just my age and stage of life. Children’s birthdays are milestones and therefore almost demand celebration. They have all these things they want to do but can’t until they’re older/taller/heavier/whatever. They have Goals. But in middle age, whatever goals you still have to accomplish are typically not related to or dependent upon age, outside of the rather dark “I’d better get this done before I drop dead.” But once you’ve been adult for a good long while, and most milestones are distant in the rearview mirror, the only milestone left is Death. And at that point, birthdays start to pack a bitter punch.
But never mind all that, dear reader…today we shall celebrate! My personal celebration shall include lunch with the fuckin’ loved ones at some inappropriately ritzy steakhouse, getting absolutely shithoused on a wicked whiskey flight or two, and over-priced deserts that are literally on fire. Then back to the Safe House for an orgy of homemade chocolate cupcakes, Jack Daniels, and writing. As your mentor/role model/ersatz life-coach, I advise you to do the exact same thing. Let’s get weird.

N.P.: “Happy Birthday – Epic Version” – Rok Nardin

June 3, 2025

On this blistering June 3, 2025, we’re raising a double-barreled toast to two literary titans born on this day—Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and Larry McMurtry (1936–2021)! Ginsberg, the Beat shaman, detonated Howl like a lysergic pipe bomb, his ecstatic, jagged verses a middle finger to Moloch’s mediocrity, chanting for the dispossessed with a cosmic wail that still echoes through America’s underbelly. Meanwhile, McMurtry, the Texas bard, carved Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show from the sun-bleached bones of the West, his pen a Bowie knife slicing open the bruised heart of the frontier—cowboys, dreamers, and misfits spilling their melancholic beauty onto the prairie dust. One howled at the moon, the other sang about its sorrow; together, they torched conformity and mapped the wild soul of this land. So crank the jazz, pour the whiskey, and drink deeply to these two badasses.

N.P.: “Lost My Mind” – Left Lane Cruiser

Word of the Day: immure

To immure means to enclose or confine someone or something within walls, often in a literal sense, like being bricked up in a dungeon, but it can also lean metaphorical – think trapping someone in a situation they can’t escape. It’s got a deliciously dramatic vibe, perfect for tales of gothic intrigue or self-imposed isolation.

The word immure comes from the Latin in- (meaning “in” (duh)) and murus (meaning “wall”), so it literally means “to wall in.” It slipped into English via Old French emmurer around the late 16th century, carrying a medieval flavor of castle keeps and secret chambers. Picture a monk scribbling by candlelight, deciding someone’s fate with a quill and a stone wall – that’s the energy immure brings.

Brother Thaddeus, the monastery’s most insufferable know-it-all, had a peculiar habit of correcting everyone’s Latin chants – mid-verse, no less. One frosty evening, the monks, fed up with his sanctimonious droning, decided to immure him in the abbey’s oldest wine cellar with nothing but a crust of bread and a particularly judgmental rat for company. By morning, Thaddeus was chanting apologies through the keyhole, promising to keep his pedantry to himself if they’d only let him out to finish his turnip stew.

N.P.: “Set It Free” – Buckcherry

June 1, 2025

Happy June, dear reader. Yo rent is due.

I’m once again running behind on the production schedule for the two books I’m working on (one officially, the other not), so I’m going to keep things on the brief side today.

Today we pour some out for literary badass Edith Wharton. The details and timeline of the final events of her life seem to vary greatly depending on which source one consults, but all accounts agree: on this day in 1937, Edith collapsed from a heart attack. Some sources say this happened at her French country home, while others insist it happened at the home of Ogden Codman, a big-deal architect and designer. She survived the heart attack, but she dropped dead two months later from a stroke, hitting her at Le Pavillon Colombe in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, France, where she died at 5:30 p.m. But that moment on June 1 marked the beginning of the end for a writer who wielded her words like a blade, carving out truths about wealth, class, and the human condition which still sting today.

Wharton didn’t dick around with pretty illusions. Books like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth aren’t polite little tea-party reads—they’re a liver-kick, peeling back the suffocating traditions and quiet savagery of a world obsessed with appearances. She wrote with a fierce, clear-eyed intensity that makes you feel the rot beneath the polish, the ache behind the opulence. In 1921, she became the first woman to snag a Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence, which winning was a fuck-you to anyone who thought a woman couldn’t cut to the bone of the human condition.

Her death was the end of an era for a writer who made us see the cracks in the American Dream, the ones we’re still tripping over today. Wharton’s legacy demands we face the mess of our own making, unblinking. So here’s to the literary titan who never flinched, whose words still burn with a clarity that’ll wake you up faster than a shot of Jack. Let us pour some out today for Auntie Edith.

N.P.: “Black Betty” – The Dead Daisies

May 31, 2025

Today is hot as balls in Fecal Creek. Day two of triple digits, dear reader, and its technically not even June! All the prognostications, scientific and otherwise, indicate that this is going to be a violently and punitively hot summer. As I may have mentioned before, I’m actually going to try to lean into the heat this year. Sort of an “if you can’t beat it, join it” resignation, I suppose. To that end, I may road trip to Death Valley this summer. If I’m feeling really ballsy, I might even book a stay at the notorious Tarantula Ranch. After a couple of days dealing with scorpions and vipers in 120F+ heat, coming back to The Creek will feel downright autumnal. Such drastic measures may be ill advised though…even a couple of days in those sorts of conditions can permanently scramble a person’s mind, even if it doesn’t kill him. Rumor has it that Charles Manson was a pretty reserved, well-adjusted dude before he decided to take up residence in Death Valley. I dunno. We’ll see.

There’s no getting around the fact that aside from personal misery and discomfort and swamp ass, this heat makes life around here difficult. I’m pretty much stuck in the Safe House for the time being…the asphalt on the street outside is so hot that it causes tires to melt completely in a couple of blocks. Regrettably, I didn’t stock up on booze before the heat wave hit, so I’m shit out of luck in the tequila and whiskey department. The heat seems to block satellite signals, so there’s no reliable internet connection. The garage door quit working, though that might be due to demonic possession rather than extreme heat…who knows. No one’s talking. Even my Mexican puppy, who was whelped in the brutal Tijuana heat, finds the present conditions untenable. She’s on strike, refusing to even be cute until the situation improves.

But never mind all that…today is massive on the Dead Poets Society calendar. On this wild, untamed day—May 31, 1819—a raw force of nature roared into being in West Hills, New York. Walt Whitman, the untethered soul who’d soon carve his name into the beating heart of poetry, came kicking and screaming into the world. This isn’t our usual birthday nod, dear reader…it’s a full-throated howl for the man who’d become the father of free verse, a literary outlaw who tore through the stuffy rules of his time with the reckless abandon of a storm. His work, sprawling and sweaty like Leaves of Grass, doesn’t play nice with polite society—it’s transcendental, sure, but it’s also got the grit of realism, the kind of voice that makes you feel the dirt caked under your nails and the thrum of your own pulse.

Whitman’s words aren’t here to coddle you. They’re a call to the wild, a dare to embrace the messy, beautiful chaos of the human spirit and the body electric. His poems still get hauled into classrooms, thank Christ, not because they’re tame or safe, but because they’ve got the kind of fire that makes you feel alive, line after line. It’s the sort of fearless, in-your-face brilliance that keeps poetry kicking through the ages.

To demonstrate Whitman’s current cultural significance, remember, dear reader, that it was Walt Whitman who ultimately brought down Walter White. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Walt, Breaking Bad would likely be into its 10th amazing season by now.

So here’s to Whitman, the rugged bard who showed us how to sing our own song, unapologetically, with every ounce of our being. Let’s raise a glass (unfortunately the strongest thing on hand is lemonade) to the man who’s been shaking things up for over two centuries—may his spirit keep us restless, always.

N.P.: “The Heat” – The Bones of J.R. Jones

Word of the Day: phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria (noun): An extravagant or rapidly shifting series of images, scenes, or events. Often surreal, like the fever dream offspring of Salvador Dali and a fog machine that accidently got doused in absinthe.

This six-syllable beast is French by the way of Italian (phantasma, meaning apparition) and Greek (phantazein, “to make visible”). It originally described spooky lantern shows in the last 1700s, where ghastly apparitions cavorted on the walls to the audiences who clearly hadn’t discovered Netflix yet. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and now the word applies to anything dazzling, surreal, or chaotic enough to make you question what you just saw.

Last Tuesday, I found myself on a regrettably misjudged blind date at a “conceptual sushi” bar. The walls were painted in migraine-inducing hues of magenta. Tiny drones floated around distributing soy sauce, landing in your palm like mutant fireflies. Somewhere about us, a DJ dressed as a sixteenth-century plague doctor spun trance tracks that sounded like a Roomba choking on a harmonica. My date, a professional “life coach,” was Instagramming her un-photoshoppable sashimi while babbling at me that mercury was in retrograde.
Somewhere amid all this aesthetic carnage, the dried seaweed I was chewing achieved an unfortunate synergy with the sake I’d been guzzling wholesale to cope. And then, like clockwork, the bathroom hit me with an urgency that felt almost biblical in its scope. On the way there, I tripped over an LED art installation of “origami tigers,” clawed at a neon bonsai tree, and landed in front of a video montage projected onto the bathroom door.
It was a phantasmagoria of winding anime pandas, old Godzilla clips, and stock footage of oil spills. “Experience Transcendence Through Crisis,” the caption advised. I stared at it, utterly destroyed by existential malaise and the sushi equivalent of a bad acid trip.
Needless to say, there won’t be a second date.

N.P.: “Living For The City feat. Tash Neal” – Slash

May 29, 2025

Strap in, you uncultured heathens, because today we’re going to the fucking ballet. Because we’ve got class, don’t we, dear reader? Damn right.

Rewind to May 29, 1913, when Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées became ground zero for a creative detonation that’d leave the arts bleeding and begging for more. Igor Stravinsky, a mad Russian genius with a penchant for sonic mayhem, unleashed The Rite of Spring—a ballet so raw, so primal, it made the powdered-wig crowd lose their goddamn minds. No tutu-and-slippers affair, this; this is a feral, earth-shaking ritual that’d ripple into the literary sphere like a tidal wave crashing through a library.

The setup alone is a fever dream: Stravinsky’s score is nuts (at least it was considered so then), all jagged rhythms and dissonant howls, conjures a pagan rite where a young girl dances herself to death to appease the gods of spring. The premiere was a straight-up scandal. The audience rioted—fists flying, boos drowning out the orchestra—because this wasn’t art as they knew it; this was a declaration of war on tradition. Stravinsky later said he’d never seen such a “terrifying” reaction, and Nijinsky (the choreographer) had to shout counts from the wings just to keep the dancers on beat amid the chaos.

Why does this matter to a literary fiend? Because in addition to pretty much breaking music and dance, The Rite of Spring cracked open the cultural psyche, inspiring writers to chase that same raw, untamed energy. Modernist scribes like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, already stirring the pot with their own rule-breaking verse, found a kindred spirit in Stravinsky’s rebellion. You can draw a straight line from the ballet’s savage pulse to the apocalyptic undertones of Eliot’s The Waste Land, published just nine years later in 1922.

This event, a glorious middle finger to the establishment, redefined what art could be. It dared to be ugly, to be real, to rip the veil off human nature and show the blood beneath. On May 29, 1913, Stravinsky lit a fuse that’d burn through the century, and we’re still feeling the heat. In that same spirit, let’s write something today that’d make the old guard clutch their pearls all over again.

N.P.: “Hau Ruck 2025” – KMFDM

May 28, 2025

Today, dear reader, we wind the dial back to 1937, a year when the world was still clawing its way out of the Great Depression’s chokehold. On May 28, John Steinbeck—that raw, unflinching scribe of the human struggle—dropped a literary bombshell with Of Mice and Men, first published as a novella in The American Mercury magazine before it landed on bookshelves later that year. The book was a deep dive into the shattered dreams of two drifters, George and Lennie, chasing the American Dream in a world that’s nothing but dust and broken promises.

Steinbeck was not one to mess around. His lean, razor-sharp prose slices through the page like my switchblade, laying bare the brutal loneliness and fragile hope of an era where survival was a daily gamble. You can feel the weight of the time in every line—the desperation, the fleeting glimmers of something better, always just out of reach. It’s storytelling that doesn’t hold your hand or whisper sweet nothings; it grabs you by the collar and forces you to stare into the abyss of a society on its knees. And even now, nearly a century later, its legacy burns through American literature, a haunting reminder of what happens when you dare to look away from the underbelly of the human condition.

N.P.: “Are They Real or Not – Special Version” – Boys Don’t Cry

Review: The Human Centipede Trilogy

The Human Centipede Trilogy

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 27 May 2025 .

2.5 out of 5

I Lost a Bet and Got Sewn to The Human Centipede Trilogy: A Marathon Review of Glorious, Gnarly Horror

What it is, dear reader. Today’s post will be less Shakespeare and more shitshow. I lost a bet—don’t ask, it involved tequila and a first edition of Naked Lunch—and my punishment? Watching and reviewing all three Human Centipede movies in one butt-clenching sitting. Yeah, all three. I thought I was tough, having survived the first film back in the day, which left me rattled despite my usual “meh” to horror. But this? This was a descent into a septic tank of cinematic insanity. Grab a barf bag, because I’m diving into this trilogy like a doomed centipede segment, and I’m dragging you with me, mainly so you don’t have to do it alone.

By now, you know me, dear reader, as the guy that laughs at Saw traps and shrugs at Hostel, but I got blindsided by The Human Centipede (First Sequence) years ago. Tom Six’s 2009 freakshow—where a mad doctor stitches three people ass-to-mouth to form a grotesque “centipede”—wasn’t just gross; it was pretty deeply unsettling. The clinical vibe, the silence, the way Dieter Laser’s Dr. Heiter stared like he was auditioning for Satan’s optometrist? It stuck with me, and not in a fun “let’s rewatch” way. So when my buddy bet me I couldn’t handle a trilogy marathon, I scoffed. I’m the dude who read American Psycho while eating tacos. How bad could it be? Spoiler: I’m now spiritually unemployed.

The Marathon: 5 Hours, 3 Films, 1 Existential Crisis
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)
Runtime: 92 minutes. Feels like: A lifetime in a German dungeon.
Well, here we go. Rewatching First Sequence was like revisiting a nightmare you swore you’d burned. Two American tourists (Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie) and a Japanese dude (Akihiro Kitamura) get lured to Dr. Heiter’s sleek, unsettlingly sterile house. Next thing you know, they’re drugged, strapped, and sewn into a human caterpillar for “science.” The concept alone is enough to gag a maggot, but it’s the execution that’s diabolical. Six doesn’t linger on gore; he makes you feel the violation through long, quiet shots of Heiter’s glee and the victims’ muffled sobs. Laser’s performance is unhinged—his bug-eyed intensity and broken English (“I vill feed you!”) make Hannibal Lecter look like a vegan life coach. In this sea of unsettling images, perhaps the most disturbing is the fact that Dr. Heiter wears Crocs™ whilst performing surgery.
The infamous “feeding scene”? I gagged harder than I did at my aunt’s vegan meatloaf. It’s not the visuals (though, ew); it’s the psychological weight. These people are completely aware, trapped in a living hell. The first time I saw it, I was disturbed by how it crawled under my skin. This time, knowing what’s coming, I’m just mad at myself for not betting double-or-nothing. Literary merit? Hell yeah—think Kafka’s Metamorphosis but with worse plumbing. It’s a twisted allegory for control, dehumanization, and, I suppose, German efficiency.
I’m hesitant to review or even rate this film, as Roger Ebert’s review and rating was about as perfect as such a thing could be. And I quote: “I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” This review was published on May 4, 2010, in the Chicago Sun-Times. He was basically saying that the film’s extreme and depraved content defies conventional evaluation, and he was quite right. I’m not about to defy that rationale. But there are a couple of things I want to touch on since we’re here.
First, Deiter Laser makes this film what it is. Dieter plays the role of Dr. Josef Heiter, a deranged German surgeon who is cold, calculating, and sadistic. Laser’s performance made Dr. Heiter one of the most memorable villains in horror film history. No small feat.
Second, what disturbed me when I first watched this movie and what disturbs me still most about it are 1) the mind that could think this up. Who’s the person who could have made whatever kind of movie with whatever kind of message he wanted, and he chose to do this. I’m not sure that I’d want to go drinking with Tom Six, based only on this movie. And 2) what must it have been like on the set? These are young actors, probably easily the biggest gig in their nascent careers, of course they took the role, even after having read the script. But imagine having to show up on set for weeks, putting your north pucker on someone’s south pucker. These poor kids…and their poor families…they’ve been supporting these kids acting dreams for years, and hot damn they already got their first role in a horror feature. Was there a premiere for this thing? Can you imagine going to the premier with your daughter to see her in her what will you’re certain will be the first of many starring roles in a major motion picture. And there she is, your little princess, on a screen bigger than God, being surgically forced to eat shit. What did these families say to Tom Six at the after-party? Did they shake his hand? Was Tom Six assaulted by multiple sets of parents? Nothing would surprise me.
Also, the spiral staircase in the escape scene was brilliant.
I will say that knowing what I was getting into beforehand made the experience significantly less traumatic than my initial viewing. The same cannot, however, be said about the next two films that I’m about to sit through. Might as well get on with it. Press Play.

The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)
Runtime: 91 minutes. Feels like: Being buried alive in a porta-potty.
The pre-credit info blurb just let me know that this film was banned in England, a fact about which writer/director Tom Six is extremely proud. Good for him. I’d be proud, too. Maybe this Tom Six guy is cooler than I thought.
Damn…this one opens right where the last one left off, which I would have really rather left it alone, in the past. I had hoped we had moved on. But here we are.
Oh, this is meta as hell…the movie doesn’t take up the plot where we left it in the last movie…we are watching the end credits roll with some bug-eyed fat man. It quickly becomes obvious that Part II is about a guy who watched Part I and gets inspired to one-upmanship. This is meta as hell. And it gets even more self-referential: the actress Ashlynn Yennie, who plays Jenny, the only surviving part of the Human Centipede in the first film, shows up in this film playing herself. This could be the most meta thing I’ve seen since grad school.
Apparently, after the release of the first film, Tom Six heard “that was messed up” and went, “Hold my scalpel.” Full Sequence cranks the dial to 11, swapping the first film’s restraint for a black-and-white bloodbath. This time, we follow Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a sweaty, asthmatic creep obsessed with the first movie. He’s not a doctor—just a parking lot attendant who decides to DIY a 12-person centipede in a grimy warehouse. Yeah, 12. With hammers, duct tape, and zero medical skills.
If First Sequence was a scalpel, this is a sledgehammer. The gore is splatterpunk and cartoonish—think stapled flesh and teeth-knocked-out DIY surgery—but the vibe is suffocating. Martin’s silent, bug-like obsession (Harvey doesn’t speak, just wheezes) makes Heiter look cuddly. The meta angle—Martin’s inspired by the “fictional” Human Centipede—is clever but drowned in filth. There’s a scene with a newborn baby that made me yeet my popcorn and question my life choices.
Literary parallel? This is American Psycho meets 120 Days of Sodom, a study in obsession and depravity. But where the first film had a twisted elegance, this is just… mean. The scatology is no longer basically implied like the first movie…this time it’s right there, in repugnant black and white. I’m not disturbed; I’m exhausted. My badass cred is crumbling like Martin’s duct-tape stitches.
Rating: 5/10 rusty staples. Points for audacity, but I need a shower and a priest.

The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) (2015)
Runtime: 102 minutes. Feels like: A prison riot in my soul.
It’s about midnight, I’m a husk of a man, but Final Sequence is here to finish me. Here are the essentials: Set in a desert prison, this flick follows Bill Boss (Dieter Laser, back and yelling), a psychotic warden, and his accountant Dwight (Laurence R. Harvey, also back) who decide to solve prison riots by—you guessed it—making a 500-person centipede. Tom Six is clearly trolling, and I’m his victim.
And Holy monkey, the metaness keeps doubling down on itself. Part III starts with the ending of II, and then the end credits roll (basically the same beginning as II, but updated). And we see someone else is watching II and Getting Ideas. But who is watching? Why, it’s our old friend from I, Deiter Laser, the insane psycho surgeon from I. But he got quite killed in the end of I…bullet through the head. So now Dieter is back…as someone else? Holy shit. But wait…Dieter is being shown the film by…why, it’s our old friend we just left in H.C.II, Laurence R Harvey, the dude who played Martin. But he too got quite killed in the end of II…bullet through the head. So now Laurence too is back…as someone else? Holy shit, indeed. I sense a bit of a pattern, here, dear reader. This is either laziness or brilliance. We shall see.
Okay…so Dieter is ostensibly back as an entirely new character, as a prison warden named Bill Boss. But he’s the same guy! At first I thought these roles might have been given to these two actors to showcase the breadth of their respective abilities. Nope! Dieter is the exact same guy from I, just without the lab coat. His voice and distinct German accent are exactly the same. His strange and disturbing mannerisms and psychotic reactions are exactly the same. His antisocial contempt for everyone around him and indeed all human beings is the same. Exactly no attempt has been made by him or anyone else to change a thing about Dieter’s character other than his clothes. Is he the surgeon reincarnated? And if he just watched the first two movies, wouldn’t he be shocked by his total, identical resemblance to the Dr. Heiter in I? Or is Dr. Heiter just the latest incarnation of some sort of evil juggernaut who keeps coming back, no matter how you killed him in the previous movie, a la Jason Vorhees or Michael Meyers? Wouldn’t he recognize his assistant/prison accountant as Martin when he watched II? Also, there is simply no getting around the fact that dressed in a cowboy hat, bolo tie, bald head, and light colored sunglasses, Dieter looks disturbingly like James Carville.
Another brilliant meta moment: Dieter says, “Over my dead body,” a clear reference to the death of his character in I.
He snacks on a jar of clitori from Africa, and he has the prison kitchen prepare an inmate’s balls for his lunch. He then rather orgiastically wipes the blood from that castration all over his face
Then he gets a hummer from porn star Bree Olson, to completion, as we watch his already disturbing face contort. The scene subsequently devolves.
None of the correctional officers in the prison where Deiter is the warden seem to notice/care that the warden is clearly, egregiously, totally insane.
It turns out the reason Dwight the accountant (who was Martin in II) was showing the I and II movies to Deiter was to offer a solution to control the riotous prisoners.
Then the metaness just explodes as Dieter refers to the first two movies as “That B-movie shit.” When he learns that they will be bringing the writer and director of the movie, Tom Six, himself, into the movie to advise them on how to make a human centipede, Dieter says of Mr. Six: The man is still in his potty stage. A poop-infatuated toddler…a stupid filmmaker [with] a poooooop fetish.”
Once the decision is made to make the prisoners into a giant, 500-person human centipede to control them and to keep themselves from getting fired by the governor, Dwight, the prison accountant, drops a great quote: “We don’t gotta deal with their shit anymore, they just gotta deal with each other’s.”
The most meta moment is when Tom Six himself shows up, and his charaacters direide Mr. Six as a “man…still in his potty stage. A poop-infatuated toddler…a stupid filmmaker [with] a poooooop fetish.”
They reference the cultural impact of The Human Centipede movies, mentioning the South Park episode The Human Cent-iPad.
Running with the self-referential meta-dom, Deiter: “Wake up! We are not in a movie, playing some idiots!” Oh, but you are. Aren’t you?
Things hit peak meta-weirdness when Tom Six tells his characters that they may use this human centipede idea, but he’s sick of the “rubber and latex” bullshit from his movie sets, so he wants to see a real operation in person. Even though it’s obviously going to be more rubber and latex bullshit from his movie set…or is it?
The prisoners are to be shown the first two films back-to-back on movie night.
“This trash occupies a world in which the stars don’t shine” Which, of course, is a meta-as-fuck call-back to Roger Ebert’s legendary review of the first film. While watching the films, one inmate calls for it to be banned. Priceless. I have new respect for Tom Six.
During the procedure, Bill Boss offers to show Tom Six “some human centipede improvement.” Which is “copyrighted by Bill Boss.” So the characters are now giving the writer director advice on the movie, while maintaining the copyright?
Then Tom Six throws up in disgust.
Then the governor changes his mind about firing the warden, turns the town car around, and goes back to the prison to tell Deiter he’s brilliant and that this is the way of the future of incarceration. Dwight claims credit for the idea, and Deiter shoots him.
The film is set in color, with a budget that emphasizes fake blood and shock tactics. Laser hams it up, screaming about “castration rehabilitation” while his accountant Dwight (played by Laurence R. Harvey) mumbles alongside him . The tone of the film is bonkers, like a Troma flick on bath salts, and the centipede itself is less horrifying than the first film’s trio, more like a grotesque parade float . The final scene, where Boss revels in his “creation,” is almost funny, but the overall vibe of the film is more numbing than disturbing.
The literary angle? It’s Lord of the Flies with a fetish for bureaucracy. The prison-as-microcosm thing could’ve been sharp, but it’s buried under juvenile shock tactics. I’m not disturbed anymore—just numb, like I’ve been lobotomized by a YouTube prank channel. The final scene, where Boss revels in his “creation,” is almost funny, but I’m too broken to laugh.
Rating: 3/10 prison slop trays. It’s a middle finger to taste, but I respect the hustle.

The Aftermath: I’m Not Okay
Five hours after I started this nonsense, I’m sprawled on my couch, questioning every decision that led me here. The trilogy is a descent from disturbing art to gross-out stunt. First Sequence is a legit horror gem—tight, creepy, and oddly poetic. Full Sequence is a middle finger to subtlety, and Final Sequence is a fever dream that forgot why it exists. Together, they’re a testament to Tom Six’s obsession with pushing boundaries, even if he trips over them.
As a literary blogger, I’ll grudgingly admire the trilogy’s guts. It’s a twisted fable about power, bodies, and the human condition—Dante’s Inferno with really shitty hygiene. But as a guy who thought he was unshakable? I’m shook. The first film still haunts me, the second made me hate mirrors, and the third… well, I’m just glad it’s over.
Final Marathon Rating: 5/10 cursed stitches. Respect for the vision, but I’m burning sage and never betting again.
Do me a favor, dear reader…if you see me betting over tequila again, slap me with a copy of War and Peace.

N.P.: “Phantom of the Opera” – Jonathan Young, Annapantsu

May 26, 2025

Listen up, my young, well-meaning, but benighted reader: someone wished me a “Happy Memorial Day” this morning, and I damn near lost my mind. Happy? No. This isn’t a frolic through a field of daisies, some Hallmark-sponsored excuse to crack open a cold one and pretend everything’s peachy. It’s not the “kick-off” of summer. It’s not just a great time to get a great deal on a new car down at the Fecal Creek Auto Mall. Today, May 26, 2025, is Memorial Day, dammit, a solemn call to remember the soldiers who bled out on battlefields so we could sit here arguing about the best hot dog toppings. It’s a day to honor the dead, not to slap a smiley face on sacrifice. So let’s cut the crap and dig into what this day actually means, beyond the shallow platitudes.

Memorial Day—originally Decoration Day, born in the shadow of the Civil War back in 1868—exists to commemorate the men and women who died in military service. We’re talking about the ones who didn’t come home, the ones who gave every last breath for a cause bigger than themselves, whether it was storming the beaches of Normandy, sweating it out in the jungles of Vietnam, or facing down hell in the deserts of Afghanistan. It’s not Veterans Day, which honors all who served; this is for the fallen, the ones whose names are etched on gravestones and whispered in prayers. The first official observance saw folks decorating graves at Arlington National Cemetery, a tradition that still holds, and it became a federal holiday in 1971, pegged to the last Monday in May. That’s the raw history, but the meaning runs deeper—it’s about facing the cost of freedom, the kind of cost that leaves families shattered and futures unwritten.

So how do we observe it without turning it into a quasi-patriotic circus? First, ditch the “happy” nonsense and start with respect. Visit a cemetery—Arlington if you’re near D.C., or your local veterans’ plot—and lay a flower on a soldier’s grave. If you can’t get to a cemetery, take a moment of silence at 3:00 PM local time, part of the National Moment of Remembrance, and let the weight of those sacrifices sink in. Fly the flag at half-staff until noon, as tradition demands, to signal mourning before the day shifts to resilience. And if you’re near a military base, listen for the bugle call of Taps at dusk—it’ll haunt you, in the best way.

Don’t just stop at gestures, though. Educate yourself on the stories of the fallen—read about someone like Sgt. William H. Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor recipient, who took a bullet to keep the flag flying during the Civil War, or Cpl. Jason Dunham, who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq in 2004 to save his squad. Their courage isn’t abstract; it’s the kind of raw, unflinching bravery that demands we live better, not just grill better. And if you’re moved, support organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project or the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which help families of the fallen navigate their grief.

Memorial Day isn’t just about celebration—it’s a reckoning. It’s about staring into the abyss of loss and vowing to remember, to carry the torch for those who can’t. We can certainly celebrate the freedom the fallen provided for us, but let’s remember to honor the dead with the reverence they deserve. Anything less is a betrayal of the blood they spilled.

N.P.: “The Star Spangled Banner/4th of July Reprise” – Boston