If you stumbled across this article because of a web search, chances are you already know that Glenn Danzig (he of Misfits, Samhain, and his eponymous band) has made a movie. You probably know it’s called Verotika, and that it’s based on various works published by his comic book company of the same name. And you’ve probably heard it’s bad. Like, really bad. All these things are true.
But on the last part, let’s be fair. It wasn’t any movie studio that greenlit Danzig’s passion project, nor even a schlock direct-to-VOD outfit. Rather, it was his friends at Cleopatra Records who put up the cash and gave Glenn their blessing to make the movie he wanted to make. So out of the gate, we have two handicaps: First, a budget the size of Jeff Bezos’s lunch bill. Second, the fact that Glenn Danzig’s personal aesthetic is, um, unique.
A singular vision … in three parts
The movie’s format is an anthology—specifically, a trilogy, in homage to earlier films like Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath or Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror. In common with many such films, the three stories are tied loosely together by a narrator. In this case, our narrator is Morella, played by porn star Kayden Kross.
Before we get to our three main acts, however, Verotika starts off with a mega-bang. Leave it to Glenn Danzig to lead with nothing less than injury to the eye, in a graphic double-gouging scene that in every way equals—and perhaps exceeds—the splinter-to-the-eye scene from Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.
This opening scene received rip-roaring cheers from everyone in the audience at the special screening I attended at San Francisco’s historic Castro Theatre. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there … albeit in some head-scratchingly bonkers ways.
On to the main event(s).
The Albino Spider of Dajette
Glenn Danzig wants to make it clear that this story is set in Paris. That’s why he’s dressed up the generic sets with signs in French. It’s why the news reporter is dressed like Inspector Gadget. It’s why the police are dressed in 1940s-era period uniforms, despite packing a mix of German Lugers and modern SIG Sauers. And it’s why every actor in the piece is required to speak in “un outraageous Fronch accent.” Somebody should have told Glenn that, accent or no, French people don’t speak English to each other.
Our story begins with a woman in a pink wig—our Dajette—making out with a man with a very Fronch mustache. At some point he gets frisky and wants her to take off her shirt. She protests, and with good reason, because when he finally gets her boobs out, he is shocked to find she has eyes for nipples. Why is never explained.
The man runs out, naturally, in disgust. When a friend arrives to see what’s wrong, Dajette sobs, “It happened again!” We are led to understand that she of the eye-boobs has led a rather troubled love life.
Left alone in her misery, Dajette sobs and sobs. And, naturally, the eyes on her nipples are also crying. Now this part is a little hard to explain (like much of the movie), but the magic tears from her boob-eyes land on an albino spider, which causes it to turn into a giant spider-man with six arms and two legs, who can only take physical form while Dajette is asleep, and whose raison d’être seems to be to anally rape women and then break their necks. This last proclivity leads the local police to give their mysterious killer the imaginative nickname “ze Neckbreakairr!” Hilarity ensues.
At some point in this story, Dajette wanders into a café and sits down a table that already has a cup of coffee sitting on it. A waiter strolls over and tells her that the café is closing, but that she can have a refill if she wants. She says, “No thank you, I am leaving,” pays for the coffee, and leaves.
Change of Face
Oh gosh, whatever could this segment be about? OK, I’ll spoil it: A crazy lady is going around, carving women’s faces off, and hanging them on her wall. Why is never explained, except that maybe she sometimes wears them to cover the Halloween-store scars on her own face? But that doesn’t explain why she collects so many faces, when the actress playing the crazy lady always looks the same, whether she has the Halloween-store scars or not. Sometimes she talks to the faces, because crazy. They don’t talk back, though; they’re just ripped-off human faces.
Crazy lady has a job as (naturally) a stripper. But this does nothing to explain why she has to steal faces, because when she’s stripping she always has her face covered with a veil and she goes by the nom de pôle “Mystery Girl.” This moniker is apparently well-deserved, because it’s the only name anybody knows her by, including her fellow strippers. This leads to lines like: “Hey, Mystery Girl! The police are here looking for you!” and “I’ll get you, Mystery Girl, if it’s the last thing I do!”
And that’s pretty much the whole story, and it takes 10-15 minutes to tell. Unfortunately, this segment is 30 minutes, and I’d estimate at least half of its length is spent on extended sequences of strippers pole dancing in a dingy set that passes for a strip club. These scenes are used to showcase strip-rock tunes from Danzig and other artists. It’s always the same three or four strippers, and always the same three or four patrons, and one of the patrons later shows up as the door guy for the strip club.
If this sounds appealing, though, I advise you to save your money and go to an actual strip club, because nobody here is actually stripping. They’re just pole-dancing in bikinis, while the patrons (rather generously, I guess) make it rain. For a movie that sells itself on violence, blood, and sex, there is surprisingly little of the latter present. In fact, Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Drive had more of all three.
Best dialog in this segment (forgive me, for I paraphrase):
“Where’s her face?”
“Her face is gone.”
“There’s your motive! The killer wanted her face!”
Drukija, Contessa of Blood
Hoo, boy. You know that old legend about the Countess Bathory, who liked to bathe in the blood of virgins because she thought it kept her young? Glenn Danzig doesn’t think you do, so he devoted the last half-hour of his movie to, uh, shocking you.
This segment is nothing but scene after scene of our Contessa Drukija coming down to the village, selecting a blonde-haired virgin, then killing her and causing her blood to get on herself in some way. Sometimes she bathes in it (it is never explained how the blood of one virgin can fill a jacuzzi-sized bathtub); sometimes she slits their throats, causing the blood to rocket out like a high-pressure garden hose; sometimes it’s more like the stream of a particularly vigorous drinking fountain; and so on. She also likes to decapitate virgins and put their heads on her wall (shades of Mystery Girl from the previous story).
That’s it. That’s really the whole thing. There’s no story or plot at all. And lest I made anything sound too titillating, trust me: Blood or no blood, watching a woman scrub up in a giant bathtub, complete with splish-splash sounds, for a solid ten minutes straight, is somehow less exciting that watching a spider crawl across the ceiling. And after that we’re treated to another five minutes of the same woman mugging in the mirror, trying to decide whether she looks any younger or not. Neither of these scenes has any dialogue.
Have I seen worse?
Look, this movie is just as amateurish and laughable as they say. If you’re a Danzig fan, though, you’re going to find a way to see it, no matter what I say. But I’m a big Danzig fan, so please believe me when I say that if I was at home watching it alone, and not at the Castro Theatre with a couple hundred howling fans (and often with laughter), I might have switched it off.
The make-up and effects are cheap. The acting is third-rate. The script hardly qualifies as such. The camerawork is at about the level of a music video, except for those times that somebody obviously bumps into the camera, jostling it as they exit the scene. Shots are often framed and blocked with little regard to composition. The editing is an utter mystery, and scenes drag on far too long. Scene after scene transitions by fading to black, rather than with a dissolve or an ordinary cut, resulting in little cohesion from one scene to the next.
For something billed as a “horror movie,” not only is it never once scary, it doesn’t even try to be. Let’s be clear about that. There is none of the language of suspense, nor even modern tricks like jump-scares, in this movie. Nothing is timed to startle you, and no character ever exhibits a believable sense of fear. This movie merely shows you stuff—ideas Glenn Danzig had rattling around his brain—and that’s it.
If that’s your cup o’ tea, then by all means, go check it out.