My quick rating - 1.3/10. I put The Centipede Strangler on my watchlist for one noble reason - it was 66 minutes long. That felt survivable. That was before I realized it was another Jamie Grefe joint and before the Cinema Epoch logo crawled onto the screen like a bad rash. At that exact moment, my soul tried to strangle itself.
The description promises something vaguely horror-adjacent. A psychic investigator is driven to madness after being hired to track a killer obsessed with centipedes. Which sounds like it might involve, I don’t know, centipedes, killing, or strangling. Silly me. What it actually involves is the same Jamie Grefe greatest hits package we’ve suffered through before - pervy camera work, zero blood, zero tension, and a profound misunderstanding of what words mean. “Strangler,” for instance, appears to mean “guy who awkwardly presses a rubber centipede onto women while they twitch.”
It opens with a woman having bad dreams, and once she wakes up, the real nightmare begins. The audio. It genuinely sounds like the microphone was placed inside a running washing machine filled with pillows. Someone whispers “centipede” ominously, as if that alone is supposed to do the heavy lifting. It doesn’t. It matters about as much as the red static rising effect, which also goes completely unexplained, like the repeated fake-orgasm-slash-possession scenes that just keep happening because… reasons?
Ah yes, the latex mask returns, that old Grefe staple, looking like it was pulled from a Spirit Halloween clearance bin. Enter the rubber centipede, the exact one you bought as a prank to scare six-year-olds. The actors seem unsure whether they’re supposed to laugh, convulse, or call an ambulance as latex boy gently fondles them with it. Seizures occur. No explanation follows. Characters vanish via what looks suspiciously like someone hitting pause and record. Still no strangling.
Once the washing machine mic is finally shut off, we’re treated to a constant, droning hum that never leaves, like tinnitus with a budget. By this point, I genuinely wondered whether to feel sorry for the actresses. Does Grefe just lie to them? Is there a script? Did anyone ask why nobody actually dies, or gets strangled, or why this feels less like a horror film and more like an excuse to grope people on camera?
The “effects” eventually escalate to fake worms from Bikini Guillotine slithering over someone for absolutely no reason, confirming that the entire special effects budget was spent at a local bait shop. The performers drift around like performance art without the performance, the art, or the talent.
Let me be crystal clear. If you see the Cinema Epoch logo, proceed with extreme caution. If Jamie Grefe’s name is attached, avoid it like the plague. The Centipede Strangler earns its #turkey rating by failing to strangle and failing at cinema on every conceivable level. The real horror is that this keeps happening, and that somehow he got these women to take their tops off.
https://jackmeat.com/the-centipede-strangler-2025/
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