Every now and then I find myself asking how and why I ended up somewhere. Blind dates, sweat-storm frat parties, swimming pools of hotels that I'm not staying in, bad concerts of bands that haven't been famous in 30 years, any sporting event not played by professionals (e.g. Little League) and all sorts of other non-ideal situations crowd my life. Usually I get through these situations with the idea that it will one day make a funny story or that I was attempting something noble. But when I find myself staring up at a screen filled with bloodied humans crawling around a warehouse on hands and knees while stapled and duct-taped to each other from mouth to rectum and it's 10 a.m. on a Monday morning, it's a little tough to see the silver lining.

The worst part is that I did this to myself. What did I expect? I knew I wasn't getting Casablanca when I walked into Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (despite both being in black-and-white), but I really, really didn't expect the movie to be this bad. No, not bad. Bad would be funnier. I didn't expect the movie to be quite as vile and tastelessly contrived. Director Tom Six's original Human Centipede: First Sequence, however stupid, left more to the imagination, working more as a laughably cheesy spine-tingler than a self-indulgent piece of torture-porn.

This time, the movie follows Martin Lomax (Laurence R. Harvey), a middle-aged, lowly parking garage attendant who lives with his abusive mother in the dreariest apartment in the U.K. He pretty much sweats his way through the first 20 minutes, then, you know, attempts surgery. We learn that his mother (Vivien Bridson) blames him for having his father put in jail—albeit for molesting his son—and she spends her screen time telling Martin that she wants him dead. Martin finds his only escape in watching the first Human Centipede over and over and even keeps an adorably (not really) crafted scrapbook of cutouts from the movie. Meta, right?

It may be, but this movie shoves meta down our throats relentlessly. Martin goes so far as to get one of the main actresses from the first film to be a part of his new centipede by luring her in under the guise of an audition for a Quentin Tarantino movie. By the way, the actress, Ashlynn Yennie, is astoundingly bad at playing herself, or she's simply someone who I would never want to be around in person—both may be true. At one point Martin awkwardly embraces a picture of the doctor/villain from the first film, and you can almost see Tom Six grinning right off camera at his own cleverness.

Scenes like the one previously mentioned actually provide the movie's laughs, of which there is one about every seven minutes until the second half. But the laughs in this movie never feel intentional and are usually the result of blatant overacting.

By the second half of the movie, all dialogue is abandoned (unless you count groans), and the film becomes as dark as the warehouse in which the victims are stored. We watch as Martin attempts to outdo his hero by increasing the size of the centipede from three people to twelve. Unlike the first film that had a surgeon performing his demented experiment, Martin has no qualifications (who does, really?) and replaces medical equipment with duct tape, a staple gun, a hammer and the like. If the first movie's tagline was "100% medically accurate," this film's tagline could be "100% doable using only supplies found at Home Depot."

I really tried to give this movie a chance, and for a bit, Tom Six had me fooled. The first half is surprisingly artsy, but Tom Six seems afraid to commit to one extreme until the second half, in which he commits too much. At one point, I found myself feeling for Martin and his situation, and while he's about as creepy as they come, no one deserves his life. I remember thinking that the movie had me more compelled than I ever expected to be. When Martin kills his first victim, we see a splatter of blood à la Hitchcock, and it works surprisingly well. I was, dare I say, impressed? The movie seemed to be balancing horror and art about as well as you could hope for in a movie titled The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence.

But Tom Six doesn't care about impressing his audience and cares even less about impressing critics. Only 30 seconds after artfully killing the first victim, Six shifts back to what he does best as we see Martin's next kill in full detail with the camera never cutting away. Still, these kills can be found in any Saw film and Six knows that. Immediately following the kill, Martin begins pleasuring himself using sandpaper. And if that hasn't convinced you not to see this movie, nothing will.