Verotika (2019)

Movie: Verotika (2019), directed by Glenn Danzig

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.67 miles, 9’07”/mile, 01:00:52 (recovery run)

 

Here’s the thing about Glenn Danzig: I was, and am, a big fan of the early Misfits. I still play Walk Among Us on a semi-regular basis. My kid has a long history of rolling her eyes when I sing “Braineaters” while dishing up her dinner. But honestly, once he named a metal band after himself and got into bodybuilding I mostly lost interest, as he seemed to exist mostly as a poster child for self-parody after that. I was therefore unaware that he’s had a line of erotic horror comics since the ’90s, and I was likewise ignorant that said comics were adapted into a movie last year—a movie written, directed, and scored by Glenn Danzig himself. So when Verotika (reportedly a portmanteau of “violent” and “erotica”) just showed up on Shudder, I figured, hey, this guy’s been into horror movies for most of his life—he might know what he’s doing!

 

Reader: he does not. Verotika is, in point of fact, appallingly awful. Granted, it started out slightly promising, with an Elvira-clone named Morella bursting the eyeballs of a shrieking, manacled victim less than 90 seconds in, but things went downhill fast. Verotika is an anthology of three distinct… well, let’s call them “stories,” though that’s a charitable assessment for one or more, as we’ll soon see. 

 

Story number one is about a fetish model named Dajette, and because this story is apparently set in France, she has one of the seven worst French accents you’ve ever heard in your life. (Note: the other six are also in this segment.) Dajette is sad because whenever she’s gettin’ it on with a guy, he always runs away when he discovers that she has eyeballs instead of nipples. Because, sure. And yeah, the whole eyeballs-instead-of-nipples thing has been done before by Ken Russell (Gothic fans REPRESENT!), but Dajette is so sad about the guys-running-away thing that HER breast-eyes cry. Unfortunately, they drip some tears on a spider, so of course it turns into a dude in a white spider suit who runs around snapping the necks of prostitutes any time that Dajette is asleep. It is, shall we say, quite a pickle. Can she figure out a way to stop him before we, the befuddled viewers, are told just what the heck is up with those nipple-eyes? The answer is yes. Yes, she can. So we never find out the deal about the nipple-eyes.

 

Guess what? That’s the BEST of the three segments.

 

Next up: a stripper with burn marks on her face cuts the face off of a beautiful woman and slaps it on her wall. Then she goes and dances at the strip joint. Then the cops find a faceless body and talk about it a little, then stand around motionless for minutes on end, occasionally interrupting the stasis to take a bite of a sandwich. Then the stripper cuts off another face, then more strip joint, then more cops. Then face-cutting, strip joint, cops. Oh but look, she accidentally dropped a business card at the scene of the last face-cutting, so the cops are on her tail! But she gets away, changes her name, and keeps doing the same thing in another strip joint in another town. Ta daaa, that’s the end of that story, which has about as much narrative thrust as your average screensaver. Honestly, not even the strippers could save this one, and in lieu of actual plot development or a satisfying conclusion, there are a LOT of strippers.

 

Third time’s the charm, you’re thinking? Nope! Rather than close on a strong note, Danzig decided to start out weak and just keep getting weaker and weaker until eventually everybody feels their souls die, because the third segment is in no way, shape, or form an actual “story.” It’s got a setup, and a premise, so that’s something: Drukija is a medieval-type countess who likes to bathe in the blood of virgins in a manner that TOTALLY UNLIKE that of Elizabeth Bathory whose story we’ve all heard a zillion times before SHUT UP. That’s it, though. That’s the whole schtick. What we’re left with is a series of scenes in which Drukija buys virgins from poor villagers, bathes in a super-metal skeleton bathtub full of blood and dead virgins, feeds chunks of dead villager to wolves, and beheads women who try to escape. But there is no actual plot, no story to tell, and no ending. Eventually it all just kind of… goes away.

 

Meanwhile, remember Morella of the bursting eyeballs? Her interstitial segments do nothing to try to tie the three vignettes together, or accomplish anything at all, really. In fact, I’m pretty sure at some point she shows those eyeballs she burst and they’re intact again, so she can’t even maintain the continuity of her own frame existence, let alone help us digest the three tales we have to gnaw through.

 

While the writing is abysmal, the direction somehow might be worse. Or maybe it’s the acting, which could maybe be a factor when apparently half the cast are porn stars. More than likely it's just that all three are irredeemably atrocious (though let it be said that the porn stars look like they can’t believe how bad their lines are). Take a scene in which there’s a breaking news story on the television, so Dajette-of-the-Nipple-Eyes points exaggeratedly at the television and says “‘Zere! On zee television!” I can only surmise that some of the choices were made to try to echo the composition of comic book panels from the source material as closely as possible onscreen—you know, like Sin City, only not good.

 

What about the effects, you ask? Welp, there’s some decent gore, one blood spray that is garden-hose-sprayer powerful, and a literal Tub of Blood, but whenever the movie uses CGI for anything it looks like a high-schooler did it twenty years ago. So there is some nostalgia working to its credit, because the greenscreened settings look maybe one step above a Zoom background and there’s a CGI spider that’s so awful-looking it brings to mind the campy schlock of mid-2000s Shock-o-Rama horror flicks like Bite Me! (Misty Mundae fans ALSO represent!) The nipple-eyes weren’t too bad, though.

 

According to the credits this film had an editor, but I see no other evidence of that. Every shot lingers too long and pretty soon you’re wondering if you’re literally watching all the coverage they shot for every scene. Not long after that, you’re certain of it. Example: after Drujika bathes in virgin blood, she goes to the mirror, leans in, touches her face, leans back, admires her youthful form, leans in, touches her face, leans back, admires her youthful form, leans in… you get the idea. If you think that was tedious to read, please believe me when I tell you it’s infinitely more tedious to watch. I actually had to rewind and run that scene again with a stopwatch just to make sure I hadn’t had a psychotic break; the mirror scene proceeds as described, with literally zero dialogue, for OVER A MINUTE before the camera cuts to a quick shot of Drukija’s assistant Sheska… and RIGHT BACK TO DRUKIJA leaning in, touching her face, leaning back… The whole thing goes on for like 1:20 before a line is finally spoken.

 

So yeah, Verotika is pretty much a masterclass in how to do every single thing wrong while making a movie. But will I watch it again? Honestly, I may well have to, if only to convince myself that I actually saw something that exists on this material plane and I didn’t just suffer a stroke. Also, Verotika still gets half a bloody severed foot, because at least it was better than the Presidential debate I skipped in favor of watching it (albeit far less scary).