You know, pretty much every review I have read so far of Glenn Danzig’s ‘directorial debut’ Verotika has started with a disclaimer: love the Misfits, been a big Danzig fan for years, and so on and so forth. I could do the same – the handful of riffs playing in the background in some of the scenes in Verotika are the only tolerable elements available here – but this seems like needless lip service at this point. The thing is, with an estimated budget of one million dollars, Verotika has somehow managed to look like a trembling onanist snuck into a second-rate strip club with a camera phone. Perhaps this is what happened; perhaps the real Verotika has been sunk into the foundations of a bridge somewhere, to be rediscovered next century, at which point all will be forgiven. But we can’t assume that’s the case – we have to deal with what we have. So the mystery remains: how did a professed lifelong horror fan with a reasonable indie-land budget and bags of potential manage to crank out a film of such questionable standards? Why didn’t anybody say? Do boobs cause insanity?
Verotika is an anthology film. This would ordinarily mean that there are three individual stories enclosed within a framing narrative, the latter of which we – sort of get, in the form of Morella (Kayden Kross), a sort of slinky female demon who sometimes addresses the audience face on by speaking to camera, and sometimes seems to be staring into the void, or at least off to the side somewhere. Maybe the fourth wall moves, like everything else on set. Anyway, after pushing someone’s eyes out for reasons best known to herself, she introduces the first story: actually, the very first story is the only segment which most closely resembles a narrative of any kind, even though it doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense. Is this what the Verotik comics are like? Only I seem to remember that there are a lot of horror comics with femme fatale characters, but they rather exceed this kind of caper. You’d only need one page.
Story one – The Albino Spider of Dajette – is ostensibly set in France; this means that an American cast have been tasked with speaking in ze French accents, fucking dreadfully, whilst tremendous care has been taken in other respects to ensure incredible levels of plausibility, such as banging out a photocopy of the word ‘SORTIE’ to stick above a cinema ‘EXIT’ (though sadly forgetting that the French word for Police is not ‘Police’ – oh, and we see the words LOS ANGELES too). So the Dajette of the story title has eyes for nipples for some reason, and when a would-be beau runs off into the night when Dajette’s rack begins staring back at him, her boobs cry tears of hardship, alerting a nearby CGI spider who turns into a spider-creature thing, soon thereafter going on a killing spree on Dajette’s behalf, though this doesn’t make much sense as it seems to actively make her life worse. Dajette responds to this nightmarish situation with all of the acting prowess of a woman trying to remember her multiplication tables. Wigs steal show, spider eventually gets defeated (and I’m not apologising for spoilers here, sorry, None of this is my fault.)
Story numero two: we are back in the US of A for what looks like an erstwhile Blackie Lawless-meets-80s-Nikki-Sixx, albeit a female (Rachel Alig), who runs around stealing faces from hot young women so she can wear them herself because she has some very, very mild scarring which is far less noticeable than a detached human face. I never realised you could peel off a human face intact with a small blunt knife, by the way, nor that simply draping it on your own face would work, but perhaps this factual oversight is the wrong hill to die on here. So this ‘Mystery Girl’, when she isn’t nicking off with faces, spends some time careering around on stage like a dervish at a nearby strip joint; I was less fascinated by this than I was by the amount of strippers in other parts of the club who seemed to keep dropping all their money. And the largest part of this segment consists of strippers; as at several points in Verotika, I was left with the sneaking suspicion that Danzig started with some strippers and panned back, hoping that at some point this would accidentally encompass a film. The fact that he so obviously cherishes the ‘stereotypical stripper’ aesthetic – elfin features apart from the lamprey mouth, enhanced boobs etc. – also makes it quite difficult to distinguish one woman from another, but anyway, yeah, Mystery Girl: does she get caught? Does she escape to flail another day? Does she run off into the night? (Do you remember the girl in the Sistinas promo video who can’t walk in a straight line, even – where the hell is he finding them?) Wigs steal show.
By the time we get to story three – a kind of baffling lamé big jugs Elizabeth Bathory riff – I’d lost the will to live and the fact that literally nothing happens here beyond a lass staring at the backs of her hands as if they’re news to her didn’t exactly engage me further. That’s it. A countess bathes in blood like you-know-who; there’s no story, just a few blonde ‘peasants’ bleeding out so that herself can stave off the ravages of time. That’s it. Credits roll.
If I was feeling charitable, I’d want to suggest that this is all some kind of homage to the weirdest, softcore-adjacent Euro cinema of the 70s and 80s, but I don’t think homage was ever the intention. And even the most rushed Jess Franco ‘we have three days of down time, let’s make a film’ type of project has more charm than this could ever have – better casts, better sets, better production values. Uncle Jess loved a zoom lens, but at least he could operate one. Verotika smacks of a man drunk on the possibilities of crowbarring endless boobs into a film at the expense of atmosphere, narrative or purpose; how you can chug through a cool million and come up with this is utterly beyond me, so considering the amount of nudity given precedence, the only answer is that someone got overexcited, forgetting everything else, or at least choosing to ignore it. It’s an interesting lesson in that respect – this is what happens when one’s ‘vision’ is uncompromised by guidance, objections or solid advice. Verotika is a coarse, boring array of errors which quickly stops being funny. Future cult classic? Stranger things have happened I suppose, but there are far better glorious errors out there.