Review: “Verotika”

Glenn Danzig’s foray into horror film-making goes wrong in all the right ways. This may be the worst movie I’ve ever reviewed, but I don’t regret watching it in the slightest.

When I first discovered that Glenn Danzig (of Misfits and “Mother” fame) had directed a horror anthology based on his darkly erotic comic book line, my first thought was “Huh, Glenn Danzig is still alive and has a darkly erotic comic book line for some reason.” My second thought was “I need to see this shit!”, largely based on the encouragement of early reviews that were universal in their assertion that the film is a so-bad-its-good masterpiece in the vein of The Room or Troll 2. I watch a ton of bad horror movies for this blog, and they usually involve mediocre filmmakers trying to tell stories that have already been told in the same way a million times before. With Verotika, you have an utterly inept filmmaker trying to tell stories that have never been told before (because no one in their right mind would think it’s a good idea) in ways that have never been attempted before (because they are not actually ways to tell a story). While that doesn’t make the movie any better, it does make it infinitely more fun to watch. This is a film that begs to be experienced amidst a gaggle of smart-ass friends and copious amounts of alcohol. I enjoyed watching it by myself, but my giggles and snarky comments and incredulous eye-rolls were wasted with just my chocolate lab to commiserate with. In the next paragraph, I’m going to explain some elements of the plot, to the extent that there is one, but if you are enticed by this type of movie viewing experience then I actually encourage you to stop here and don’t come back to the review until after you watch it. I would be doing you a severe disservice if I blunted the impact of the bewildering and unbelievable series of choices that make up Verotika by peeling back the curtain before you’ve had the chance to see it for yourself.

If you were only going to watch one of the stories in Verotika, then it should be the first one, “The Albino Spider of Dajette”. The plot centers around the titular character of Dajette, a French sex worker who inadvertently summons a serial-killing demon from her grief after a potential John spurns her advances because she has eyeballs in place of her nipples. So… yeah. It’s a little weird. The four-armed demon stalks other hookers while Dajette sleeps, threatening to rape them with its seemingly non-existent genitals before snapping their necks, and she has to puzzle out a way to stop its deadly spree. The only semi-successful element of the whole endeavor is that the demon make-up is not a complete embarrassment. The same can not be said for the acting, the writing, the production design, the pacing or the truly atrocious French accents. I learned a lot about Glenn Danzig in the thirty minutes that the story played out. Mostly about his strange kinks, but also that he has apparently never had sex with a lady or seen a motion picture before in his life. At least that is the only conclusion I can draw from his fumbling, confused expressions of sexuality and a sense of narrative structure that would make Ed Wood cringe. Is it possible that Danzig has secretly been a devout Mennonite this whole time? 

There are two other entries in the anthology, and a wrap-around segment with an Elvira/Crypt Keeper-type host who spits out words that are sort of like puns, except missing the part where they make sense in context of what we’ve just seen. Here’s the thing about Verotika:  It is utterly devoid of any kind of value beyond the schadenfreude you experience from watching something so monumentally inept. There are no redeemable concepts, zero narrative momentum, and it fails to even be the punk rock middle finger to the mainstream horror establishment that you know Danzig had envisioned. There is a non-stop cavalcade of nudity and sexual situations, yet the film is not the slightest bit titillating. There are numerous graphic murders and lingering, fetishistic shots on the carnage, but it is not the slightest bit disturbing. Women are either sex workers, strippers or virgins for the slaughter, and two of the stories revolve around women who are so vain that they murder other women in an effort to preserve their looks, but the whole thing is so bungled and insipid that you can’t even muster up the indignation to be offended at the misogyny. I don’t recommend it in the slightest to anyone who doesn’t find this kind of train wreck fascinating. If you happen to be one of the deranged few who gets a kick out of unintentionally terrible cinema, however, this is a treasure trove of schlock. Its rare that such a colossally misguided vision aligns with incompetence of a magnitude this epic, and that makes Verotika more precious than a thousand better movies that have no hope of failing this successfully.

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