Vice (2018) - Movie Review

Propaganda is not a dirty word. 99 times out of 100, whenever someone something for being propaganda, it’s because it doesn’t align with their own views. Cut deep enough into any piece of media and it always ends up being an endorsement for some brand of political thought, whether it’s immediately obvious or otherwise. I myself honestly hold no qualms in my own writings being viewed in the same way, as I’m not exactly shy about my worldview and what I perceive as matters worth discussing.

 

However, while keeping all of this in mind, there is still such a thing as bad propaganda, where the intended message at the forefront is either fundamentally incorrect or it’s presented in a way that doesn’t make it easy to get the desired effect from the audience. I’ve covered plenty of the former on here before, and even looked at some of the latter, but honestly, it’s the latter that ends up hurting more. It’s also why this film hurts as much as it does.

The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence (2015) - Movie Review

This review is something of a milestone for me, as this is where I officially come full circle. After all, the original Human Centipede was the first film I ever reviewed in any semi-semi-formal capacity. However, over the years, I’ve come to the realisation that my initial hatred for the thing was most likely a result of the reputation it had received. As such, I’ll set the record straight right now.

While I still maintain that the characters in the film were often thicker than a second coat of paint, Dr. Heiter’s performance along with the overall concept were enough to at least make it watchable. Then came the sequel, and it is here that I fear I will lose every one of my readers: The Human Centipede II, despite being a film that I predicted would happen when I first reviewed, is one of the best sequels ever made. Seriously, it does everything that a sequel should do right, with Tom Six looking back on the original idea and basically riffing on his own writing to create what I genuinely consider to be a great film… provided that your stomach can handle the gore, that is.

With this patently absurd opinion of the rest of the series, and my knowledge that Rotten Tomatoes can be incredibly misleading when it comes to what is better than what (Hypocrisy ho!), I’m looking at today’s film with probably the most optimism of any film I’ll look at this year. I think I broke at some point during The Green Inferno, but let’s see if this new perspective does me any favours anyway.