Movie Review: 'Verotika' is Wildly Terrible

What to make of the directorial debut of rocker Glen Danzig? The Mother singer has made a movie that is either one of hell of a comic troll job or an Ed Wood level, earnest abomination. Verotika is a three part anthology movie featuring three stories loosely tied together by a nonsensical interstitial storyteller who may be a vampire or a demon or The Devil? That’s where the bizarre, confounding journey of Verotika begins.

Verotika, according to research, is a combination of the words Violence and Erotica, spelled with a K for… reasons. Kayden Kross plays Morella, the narrator of these three stories that combine violence and horror in a way that indicates a particularly disturbing sexual fetish. The hosted portions of Verotika open with Morella with a woman chained to the wall. Morella walks up to her and presses her fingers unconvincingly through the woman’s eyeballs before we leave the scene, with the woman yowling ‘My eyes! My eyes,’ and move to our first story.

The first of the three stories of Verotika is called The Albino Spider of Dajette. The story begins with the aesthetic features of a low budget porno flick. A woman is performing fellatio on a prone man in a nondescript apartment. The man pulls the woman, we learn is named Dajette, into a kiss and attempts to push things further by removing the woman’s shirt. She rebuffs his attempts but he persists until a horrifying discovery.

Our heroine, Dajette, has a very unique and inexplicable physical anomaly. She has eyeballs where her nipples should be. Why? Who knows! Needless to say, her unnamed paramour is put off by Nipple-Eyes and leaves abruptly. This rejection is apparently the latest in a series and it causes poor Dajette to cry… from her Nipple-Eyes. When the tear from her Nipples falls onto a spider it somehow transforms the spider into a murderous Spider-Monster-Man.

You think I am making this up but I assure you, I witnessed this insanity, this is an actual movie. Sort of. It’s well apparent that none of the budget for Verotika was spent on sets or costumes or special effects. The look of Verotika mirrors the low budget pornography of WoodRocket, an outfit that specializes in porno spoofs of cartoons and super-heroes. The costumes appear to have been slapped together with whatever was at hand in whatever strip club locker room Danzig was filming in.

The special effects of Verotika are so bad as to lead you to wonder if this isn’t an elaborate troll job. Someone intentionally making a terrible movie could only dream of creating something as inept as Verotika. The Spider-Monster-Man in The Albino Spider of Dajette, is wearing a costume that isn’t quite finished. In the final scenes you can see the bottom of the costume hanging open as if they were too lazy to sew it shut.

I haven’t even mentioned yet that ALL of the characters in The Albino Spider of Dajette speak in a bastardized French accent, yes, even the Spider. Why? Why not? Some have theorized that this was Danzig nodding to the legendary French masters of cinema.If so we all owe a deep, heartfelt apology to the French for allowing Mr Danzig to even merely nod in their direction. The accents could also be intended as comedy but nothing rings particularly funny in Verotilka, at least not intentionally so.

I won’t spend much time on the other two parts of this anthology as the first story is really the standout in terms of crazy, silly and stupid. Story two is called Change of Face and is about a murderous stripper named Mystery Girl, played by Rachel Alig. Mystery Girl murders women by cutting off their faces. She then wears the dead woman’s face while on stage stripping, though doing so under a mask. When she’s done she staples the face to her wall.

Change of Face is most notable for showcasing Danzig’s bizarre inability to know when to end a scene. Frequently throughout all three stories you can watch confused actors standing still and silent waiting for the word cut and it never comes. Why the editor didn’t cut these scenes is something only Danzig could likely explain. My theory is, if scenes were cut in a professional manner, the film might not reach feature length.

The final story is about a Queen who bathed in the blood of virgins to keep herself young. The plot is desperately derivative and the segment is more suitable as an exploration of Danzig’s twin obsessions with boobs and blood. The nudity stands out in Drukija Countess of Blood because there really isn’t much else going on here. Repeatedly, we watch as the Countess murders a nude, blonde, virgin, covers herself in the virgin's blood, lather, rinse, repeat.

I would like to believe that the joke was on me and that Verotika is not something that was intended to be taken seriously. I’d like to believe that Glenn Danzig is somehow our greatest absurdist comedian working in film today. Sadly, there is no evidence for that belief. No, quite poignantly, we appear to be viewing what Glenn Danzig genuinely believes a good horror anthology looks like. It would be sad if it weren’t so pathetic.

Verotika is available now on most rental streaming services.