Studio: Cleopatra Entertainment
Director: Glenn Danzig
Writer: Glenn Danzig
Producer: James Cullen Bressack, Jarrett Furst
Stars: Rachel Alig, Natalia Borowsky, Alice Haig, Scotch Hopkins, Sean Kanan, Ashley Wisdom, Kayden Kross
Review Score:
Summary:
Glenn Danzig’s horror anthology tells tales of a humanoid creature manifested by dreams, a murderous stripper, and a wicked queen who bathes in the blood of virgin villagers.
Review:
Misfits musician Glenn Danzig made a horror movie. Maybe you heard the hoots, hollers, and ha-has that came out of the anthology film’s first screening. Audience members, some amused but mostly confused, immediately associated Danzig’s “Verotika” with Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room,” i.e. a movie of such astounding technical ineptitude, its awfulness had to be seen to be believed. Preferably in a midnight movie setting where equal amounts of booze and good humor would build to an ironically enjoyably “I can’t believe this actually exists” experience.
What I can’t fully figure out is whether or not Glenn Danzig knows he made a bizarrely bad movie or if he even intentionally set out to do so. In one scene, a woman picks up her home phone and immediately starts talking without ever dialing. I have to believe Danzig has used a phone enough times in his life to know this isn’t how they work, right? So why stage it that way?
On the other hand, eyewitnesses at the Cinepocalypse premiere claim that, despite the crowd howling with guttural laughter throughout the screening, Danzig professed total sincerity about his project when he discussed it. I’m inclined to believe that’s true since there’s more evidence to suggest Danzig may just be confoundedly clueless about narrative storytelling. Someone deliberately parodying bad movies would hire professional actors to overplay everything for obvious camp value. Instead, it seems Danzig merely hired inexperienced amateurs and let them do obliviously terrible work naturally.
Dig into the résumés of several “Verotika” actresses and you’ll find credits including “Slutty and Sluttier 23,” “Mick’s Anal Teens 4,” and “Big Tit Cream Pie.” I’ll support casting porn stars in mainstream movies, or mainstream-adjacent in “Verotika’s” case, when they can authentically act. But many of these collagen and silicone-enhanced women were clearly cast according to cup size and willingness to appear naked, not how well they deliver dialogue, which isn’t very well at all.
Adult film actress Kayden Kross “features,” I guess you could say, as the anthology’s horror host. After poking out another woman’s eyeballs in a standout squirm of eye trauma, she doesn’t really do anything though. Her introductions to the second and third stories are literally just the wooden words “our next story,” and that’s it.
The only other service this Poor Man’s Cryptkeeper provides is proving someone doesn’t know how to floor direct a two-camera shoot. I don’t know why there are two cameras on Kross anyway when both angles appear to be placed a mere few feet apart and at similar lens lengths. I also don’t know why Kross looks directly into the first camera when the second camera ends up being the one being used in the edit.
For some reason, which is a phrase that could precede any idle observation about “Verotika,” the film’s first segment seems to be set in France, even though one scene takes place at downtown L.A.’s clearly marked Los Angeles Theater. Everyone speaks in awkward French accents too, even though some of the actors are definitely not French. For all I know, no one is.
You might think you’re in for something wonderfully weird when the buxom lead in “The Albino Spider of Dajette” reveals she has eyeballs for nipples before crying onto a spider that turns into a foul-mouthed perversion of Mortal Kombat’s Goro. You’ll have long since realized “Verotika’s” creativity pretty much stops at basic conception by the time that creature tells a prostitute he wants to “f*ck her in the ass” before snapping her neck.
Nothing makes sense in “Verotika,” so don’t bother trying to wrap your head around any detail, no matter how slight. Glenn Danzig certainly didn’t bother. In this segment’s opening scene for instance, Dajette sits within arm’s reach of a door. Dajette’s roommate walks in speaking in a clearly female voice. Dajette asks, “Francois, is that you?” I don’t know. Maybe turn your head 20 degrees and see for yourself?
The second segment at least inspired me to do some math. “Change of Face,” about a disfigured serial killing stripper who dances while wearing the skinned faces of her victims, runs about 23 minutes total. Roughly ten of those 23 minutes consist of nothing but strip club B-roll. I guess “Verotika” figures it can salvage some watchability by distracting undiscerning men with an overload of porn performers, thongs, and bare chests.
That’s still a better ratio of concrete content to filler fluff than “Drukija, Contessa of Blood,” a segment so slim on story, I challenged myself to summarize it in two sentences when one easily encapsulates all 30 minutes. A wicked medieval queen bathes in the blood of peasant virgins. There’s no other plot. Drujika slowly rides a horse through a local village, stares contemplatively at grapes, douses herself in the gushing gore of two different women during a six-minute sequence, and admires herself in a mirror for another two minutes before the cameraman finally finds the off button on these tiresomely lengthy shots.
More boringly sleazy than it is ever remotely sexy, the 1990s comic book aesthetic where big-breasted women feature as an alien-boobed monster maker, a mutilating and murdering stripper, and a youth-obsessed despot aren’t good looks three decades later. How can an already bad movie get worse? How about dead bodies visibly breathing, a giant crotch hole in the spider-monster’s suit, made-for-TV lighting, and an overall lethargic energy that makes the oddness shockingly bland?
“Verotika” isn’t bad like “The Room” is bad. It’s just regular homemade DTV horror bad. The only difference between “Verotika” and any run-of-the-mill VOD dump is the attachment of Glenn Danzig’s name. If not for his association, the film would have been forgotten before anyone remembered it in the first place. Even if Danzig turns out to be in on the joke, “Verotika” still isn’t funny enough to be entertaining, not even as a goofily grotesque sideshow attraction.
Review Score: 25
If you want to see impossible amounts of blood explode crimson colors like the world’s worst version of a gender reveal, well, “Abigail” at least has that.