Specifically, I’m referring to fact that, despite having been a successful musician and public figure for at least forty years at the time of this film’s production, Danzig still managed to create a movie exactly like the one a horny sixteen-year-old goth kid would probably have made, given access to the same resources.
Whatever your thoughts on the result of his efforts, his refusal to countenance any form of maturity whatsoever here is genuinely quite extraordinary, arguably making ‘Verotika’ the most purely (accidentally?) punk rock thing he has been associated with since Robo quit as The Misfits drummer in 1983.
Unfortunately however, simply being a contender for the most adolescent film ever directed by a sixty-four year old man does not necessarily mean ‘Verotika’ is worth watching. Indeed, for anyone lacking either a pre-existing interest in its creator’s oft-questionable oeuvre or a very indulgent attitude toward low budget 21st century horror, I’d recommend a hard pass.
As much as I’d love to defy critical consensus and declare this an unappreciated masterpiece, the sad truth is that, by any reasonable yardstick, ‘Verotika’ is an extremely bad film in pretty much every respect; indifferently directed, cheaply staged, sketchily scripted (to put it kindly), thoughtlessly misogynistic, entirely devoid of originality and filled with dead-eyed non-performances from a cast seemingly comprised of aspirant fetish models and porn stars. (1)
Though it is not remotely as significant or enjoyable, ‘Verotika’ still, to some extent, captures the same mixture of gleeful nastiness and utter weirdness which helps make the early Misfits material so extraordinary. For all its faults, it bears the same gory signature of an artist whose brain-damaged concerns have (perhaps worryingly) remained remarkably consistent across five decades of creative output.
To run down a few elements of the ‘weirdness’ part of that equation, I’ve firstly got to commend Danzig’s refusal to adhere to the narrative conventions which usually govern the EC-via-Amicus anthology framework he has chosen to work within here.The idea that segments within a horror anthology should consist of concisely rendered cautionary tales with a circular/twist ending goes completely out the window form the outset, but… in a way, I appreciated the open-endedness of this.
And if there is ultimately no connection at all between the eyeballs-for-nipples thing and the spider-monster thing, well… why not? That’s life, right? Here’s this poor girl, just tryin’ to get through life with her freakish eye-boobs, and today, she’s having an especially hard time of it, vis-a-vis the whole aforementioned spider-monster situation. There’s no moral pay-off, no clever resolution, no lessons learned - fuck you, O.Henry! It’s actually quite refreshing.
(Of course, I didn’t realise at this point in my viewing that I was actually watching by far the most well-developed of the film’s three segments, but… we’ll get back to that soon enough.)
If the intention here was to lend the film a sense of continental exoticism, I’m afraid it's rather undercut by the fact that ‘Verotika’ otherwise remains as all-American as a burger van parked outside a Sunset Boulevard strip joint. And, given that few of the performers appear to have much prior acting experience, and seem to have been informed about the whole accent thing about sixty seconds before shooting began.... well, you can imagine the range of out-rrrageous ac-CENTS we’re treated to here.
(My favourite must be the waiter who advises our heroine to hurry home before she falls victim to “zee neck brea-CURR”.)
Were it not for Danzig’s total devotion to the gospel of low-brow / trash culture, I’d be tempted to speculate that he intended this French accent thing as a kind of Brechtian disassociation technique - like Werner Herzog using hypnotised actors in ‘Heart of Glass’, but far more entertaining. But no. There is no way a man as steadfast in his aesthetic beliefs as Glenn Danzig would countenance such pretentious/abstract bullshit.
Indeed, the most incredible thing about all this is that he is entirely sincere, but… we’ll return to that train of thought later, because unfortunately we still need to address the film’s two remaining stories.
Disappointingly, it also drops the French accents, but is notable for those of us charting ‘Verotika’s divergence from horror anthology tradition in that it doesn’t even attempt to have an ending. It basically just sets up its premise, and… stops? C’mon Glenn, give us something!
The third story, ‘Drujika: Countess of Blood’, certainly gives us… something… in that it’s a period-set Countess Bathory type affair. The attempt at a medieval setting is fairly ambitious under the circumstances, including use of actual horses, some limited location shooting and - get this! - a real wolf (albeit a not terribly threatening one).
But, on the other hand, you know we’re in trouble as soon as you note that the green-screened panoramic photo backdrop depicting the Contessa’s castle includes clouds of unmoving, still photographed smoke. Mario Bava, this ain’t.
Probably the film’s most overtly erotic segment, this one also finds Danzig indulging in some pretty shameless ‘chained virgin’ type fantasies. Perhaps he was going for a vague Borowcyzk / ‘Immoral Tales’ kind of vibe, though the faint Eastern European accents adopted by the cast aren’t as funny as the French ones, and again, the intended effect is rather spoiled by the arid, atmos-free L.A. porno feel, which hangs around the footage like disinfectant in a hospital ward.
Unfortunately, this also proves to be the film’s most boring segment - because, above all I think, what kills ‘Verotika’s chances in the midnight movie / so-bad-its-good stakes is actually its pacing.
Like so many amateur / first time filmmakers, Danzig just cannot cut his stuff for shit, stretching out most shots at least a few beats too long, and the concluding story finds him expanding this lethargic approach to a frankly quite trying degree, as he subjects us to several extended, silent medium-close ups of the Contessa bathing in blood or gazing at herself in the mirror which just seem to go on forever, seriously challenging the wakefulness of any late-night viewers who have proved hardy enough to stick with the movie thus far.
As expected by this point, there’s also pretty much no narrative here at all - just the blood-bathing Contessa going about her virgin-slaying day-to-day in more or less the manner you’d expect.
There is a certain audacity to the bit where she manages to begin fondling and eating a girl’s extracted heart whilst it remains beating and attached to the victim’s blood vessels, but the impact is deflated by the absurdly realised special effects, including the use of a heart prop whose size seems closer to that of an organ belonging to a large mammal than that of a human being.
But, it matters not. Only an utter goon would demand realism in a context like this, and besides, to return to the point I touched on above, ‘Verotika’s sole saving grace - the unique component that allows this otherwise terrible film to cycle back round and grasp at something approaching warped greatness - is that Danzig is utterly sincere in his intent to make a sexy, gory erotic horror movie.
Unbelievable as it may sound in view of what I’ve outlined above, there is not an ounce of self-mockery or camp intent discernible here. Given how rare this total absence of self-awareness is in any creative industry these days, maybe we should take a moment or two just to think about that - to let it sink in.
Like the aforementioned goth kid sitting in the corner of the classroom, scribbling drawings of women who look like Death from ‘Sandman’ fucking bat-winged demons, Danzig believes his half-baked cartoon atrocities are transgressive and shocking, and that if you don't like it, you just can't handle his dark vision.
Given how few of us can make it to adulthood whilst retaining such knuckleheaded naivety - let alone preserve it through the rigors of adult life - isn’t that, in itself, a beautiful thing?
Or, to put it another way, I’d rather sit through ‘Verotika’ a million times than read a page of Morrissey’s stupid novel.
Saner voices may contend that neither option is compulsory, but saner voices have no place in this discourse. For as the man of the hour himself once sang, “possession of a mind is a terrible thing..”.
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(1)As it seems ungallant to let a statement like that stand without unpacking it a bit, here are the results of my IMDB-based research into ‘Verotika’s cast. So, we do indeed have several porn stars (primarily Ashley Wisom), along with a large number of people who have very few IMDB credits aside from this one (so who knows what they normally do all day), and a few legit actors.
Surprisingly, probably the most noteworthy person in the cast is actually the one with the silliest name, Kansas Bowling, who it turns out has won considerable acclaim as a director of music videos (working with Iggy Pop amongst others) and played a small role as one of the Mansonites in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As one of the Contessa’s victims in ‘Verotika’, she is assigned the thankless task of remaining dead and topless through several very long scenes.
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