Movie Review: ‘Verotika’

Director: Glen Danzig

Cast: Krayden Kross, Brennah Black, Ashley Wisdom, Rachel Alig, Katarina Bucevac, Emma Hix, Alice Haig

Plot: A trilogy of erotic horror stories from the pages of punk/metal rocker Glen Danzig’s comic series Verotika.

Review: This movie is absolutely fascinating. We’ve see plenty of no-budget horror movies that range from unwatchable to passably bad. This movie is in a tier of it’s own, due to the auteur behind the film having achieved success in the entertainment industry over the course of decades, to the point that he’s often referred to as a ‘legend’ of the music world yet produced a movie that lacks any creative process or even basic storytelling ability. Glen Danzig has thrown himself into this film with what feels like an unbridled confidence that is entirely unjustified given the final product. It’s easy to assume that his reputation and fame led to people being unwilling to tell him that his ideas were terrible.

This is a movie that fails on the small and large scale. Entire stories, individual scenes and even single shots lack any sense, continuity or purpose. For example, our first tale (‘The Albino Spider of Dajette’) is set in Paris, with the cast adopting all manner of cartoon accents. One shot shows our main character leaving a cinema. All they hav to do is make sure it can pass for Paris and the theatre marquee has ‘Los Angeles’ written above it. It’s a simple shot and it fails. The next scene involves our hero entering a cafe and sitting down at a table with a coffee cup. The waiter comes up and asks if she would like a refill, she says no, puts money on the table and leaves. At no point during the writing, filming or editing process did anyone point out that she never ordered anything. The movie is filled with blisteringly obviously silly errors like this that could be the downfall of an otherwise fun horror movie.

We say ‘could’, because this level of incompetence exists through every component of the movie. Acting, pacing, cinematography, writing, sound design, special effects…whatever part of the movie you look at, it’s bad. The camera hovers around, zooming in and out with no purpose or meaning. If there’s any nuance to the cinematography it’s lost as everything is shot in mid- or closer to hide that everything is filmed against one single fake wall in each scene and there’s no set dressing. On top of that, there’s no shot in the movie that doesn’t stay on the screen at least three times longer than it needs to. One scene featuring a couple of cops discussing a dead body ends with them just standing around, saying nothing, doing nothing for what feels like a full minute before the scene ends. They mustn’t have gotten any feedback before releasing this film (given Danzig was 40 minutes late to the first screening as he was ‘getting rid of glitches’, this is likely true).

It might be best to explain the plot story by story. The three tales are interspersed by Morella (Kross) taking on the role of an Elvira or Cryptkeeper host. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the charisma or character of those figures, instead only serving to fill time. She introduces us to ‘The Albino Spider of Dajette’, the previously mentioned Parisian section of the film. Dajette (Wisdom) is a sex worker who tries to hide her breasts from people because she has eyes in the place of her nipples. Why this is, or why she’s working as a sex worker and model in spite of this, is never brought up. The story begins when her breasts cry and the tears land on an albino spider who morphs into spider-man monster equipped with six arms of which two can move at a time. Our new spider-friend will come into being whenever Dajette falls asleep so he can murder sex workers, becoming known as a serial killer called ‘Le Neckbreaker’. After a day of living with this curse Dajette tries to rob the spider of its power by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets, wherein some police shoot the spider. I’m a bit confused about how this played out, because the police or so non-plussed about a pale, six-armed man and a woman with eye nipples it weirded me out.

Next is the Change of Face, a story about a sex worker who cuts off people’s faces while a cop tries to catch her. At this point we realise that most of the creative work went into the first story, as from this point the storytelling is going to become even more meagre. The story opens with the killer attacking a woman and stealing her face, then a 5-minute long scene of strippers dancing, then some cops discussing the killing. After this the killer attacks a woman, we get another 5-minutes scene of strippers dancing (wearing the same outfits as the previous night), then the cops talking. Then there’s a confrontation between the killer and the cops (again, featuring the same strippers in the same outfits for the third night – they must stink by this point) before another 5-minute stripper scene. No one scene moves the characters closer to achieving their goals, build tension or…anything really. The ‘twist’ is that the killer is taking faces because she has burn scares or something. What makes it confusing is that she puts on the new face…then wears a mask over it. Not sure what that’s about.

Finally, Morella introduces us to ‘Drukija: Countess of Blood’ based on the historical figure Elizabeth Bathory. At first the introduction of a period setting makes this one feel like a bit more work went into it, but it has even less plot than the previous two. Drujika (Haig) kills girls and bathes in their blood…and that’s it. We see one scene after another of Drujika killing a blonde girl, splashing around in blood…and that’s pretty much what happens. No conflict, no antagonists, no character development…just one murder after another and some long shots of Drujika walking through the woods. Then at the end she feeds some store bought steaks to a wolf. The high point was a scene where Drujika is very obviously operating the blood pump on her victims neck to cause little squirts of blood from a severed artery.

Although we came into this not knowing much about Danzig, we are fascinated to learn about what happened here. As someone who speaks passionately about his love for horror movies, and must have absorbed plenty in his 65 years before making this project, it’s mind-boggling how incompetent it looks. During a post-screening Q&A Danzig expressed surprise at how many people laughed during the movie, having earnestly attempted to produce a shocking, gory and surreal nightmare inducing scare-fest. A scene of Drujika looking at herself in the mirror for literally minutes of dead air was intended to be ‘scary’ because we had seen the character drinking blood. But…nothing happens in the scene. It’s just a woman looking at herself in the mirror while the camera slowly zooms in and out. It is genuinely perplexing.

Even in areas where you would expect Danzig to do well, the film proves unsatisfying. The soundtrack is fine, but the sound design is weirdly absent. As someone who has worked in music for this long, we’d expect him to have some interesting ideas, but it’s just not there. There’s the odd experiment with a purple tint on the lighting or a rack focus, but they’re very few and fair between. The lighting is generally harsh, the camera is constantly zooming, the editing overuses fades without reason, creature costumes and prosthetics tear open and fold up…some features such as sets and costumes are going to be hampered by budget but other things come down to laziness or an unwillingness to learn.

If there’s anything to be enjoyed here, there is some shock value to the horror. Despite their best efforts, there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen in better horror movies. Blending eroticism and horror is nothing new, and the heavy use of gore isn’t as impactful as similar moments on TV, such as Game of Thrones. If it wasn’t for his clear desire to produce his own horror movie, you’d think this was just an excuse to film strippers and hang out with porn actors. Instead it’s just a disappointment on every level. It’s not scary, or erotic, it’s a lesson in what not to do for film students.

Rating: ONE out of TEN