A Georgian localization would be impossible not only because of censorship or language, but because the film has nothing to say to a culture that has already survived actual centipedes of the state. In the end, qartulad fails because the film itself fails: it mistakes volume for meaning, and cruelty for critique. Gelashvili, T. (2018). Soviet Legacies in Georgian Memory: Trauma and Testimony . Tbilisi University Press.
Law of Georgia on Broadcasting. (2019). Article 56: Content Restrictions. Parliament of Georgia. Note: This paper is a work of critical speculation. No official Georgian release of The Human Centipede 3 exists. the human centipede 3 qartulad
Author: [Generated for academic purpose] Course: Film Studies / Transgressive Cinema Date: April 16, 2026 Abstract Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) (2015) represents the logical endpoint of the director’s “transgressive trilogy”—a film so deliberately excessive in its depiction of pain, degradation, and carceral absurdity that it defies conventional narrative pleasure. This paper explores the hypothetical Georgian localization of the film, referred to as “qartulad” (in Georgian). By examining the linguistic, cultural, and legal barriers to such a localization, as well as the film’s inherent critique of the American prison-industrial complex, this analysis argues that translating The Human Centipede 3 into Georgian would paradoxically reveal the film’s central failure: its inability to generate meaningful catharsis or critique beyond shock value. The Georgian context—with its own history of Soviet-era carceral systems and contemporary prison reform—serves as an ideal critical mirror. 1. Introduction The request for a paper on “The Human Centipede 3 qartulad” is inherently speculative. No official Georgian dubbing or subtitling of Tom Six’s 2015 film exists. However, the term qartulad (meaning “in the Georgian language” or “according to Georgian custom”) invites a thought experiment: what would it mean to translate the most grotesque entry in the trilogy for a Georgian-speaking audience? Georgia’s cinematic tradition, from Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance (1984) to contemporary works like Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning (2020), has often engaged with suffering, authoritarianism, and bodily violation through allegory and restraint. The Human Centipede 3 operates through the opposite: graphic literalism. A Georgian localization would be impossible not only
Weston, K. (2015, June 22). “The Human Centipede 3: The Final Sequence of Exhaustion.” Sight & Sound , 25(7), 78–79. (2018)
This paper proceeds in three parts. First, a summary of The Human Centipede 3 and its place in transgressive cinema. Second, an analysis of the linguistic and cultural impossibilities of a Georgian localization. Third, a critical reading of the film’s politics, arguing that even a hypothetical Georgian version could not salvage its shallow provocation. The Human Centipede 3 follows Bill Boss (Dieter Laser), the sadistic warden of a failing US private prison. After being denied funding for a new execution chamber, Boss—advised by the docile accountant Dwight (Laurence R. Harvey)—creates a “human centipede” of 500 inmates. The film abandons the medical pseudo-realism of the first film and the ethical ambiguity of the second for cartoonish brutality: Boss rapes, mutilates, and castrates prisoners and staff, drinks blood mixed with Viagra, and forces inmates to eat rat carcasses. The final centipede, stitched mouth-to-anus, marches pointlessly across a desert.
Tom Six has argued that the film is “a comedy about the system.” But as critic Kelli Weston writes, “The joke is indistinguishable from the horror, and the horror is indistinguishable from endorsement” (Weston, 2015). No translation—Georgian or otherwise—can repair this core failure. The film cannot generate Brechtian alienation because it refuses to distance the viewer from the violence; it cannot generate Aristotelian catharsis because the suffering is endless and unearned. The Human Centipede 3 qartulad exists only as a provocation—a request that forces us to ask what it means to translate extreme cinema into a culture with its own history of institutional violence. The Georgian context does not domesticate the film; it exposes its hollowness. Where Georgian filmmakers like Otar Iosseliani use silence and metaphor to indict power, Tom Six uses screaming and viscera. One is art; the other is exhaustion.
Reyes, X. A. (2016). The Body in Pain in Contemporary Cinema . Palgrave Macmillan.
