Three Years Later Glenn Danzig's Notorious 2020 Horror Anthology Verotika Still Sucks
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Or you can choose a much buzzed about new movie you think would rock my world like Glenn Danzig’s widely mocked 2019 directorial debut, Verotika. Since it was first announced, Verotika has inspired all manner of feverish conversation.
From the time the first trailers were unleashed, bad movie lovers have been atwitter with excitement and anticipation. Could Verotika possibly be as terrible as it looked? Had rock legend and ridiculous human being Danzig blessed the world with another endlessly re-watchable, quotable monstrosity on par with The Room?
Did Danzig possess that tricky combination of personality, incompetence and a fascinating, total lack of self-awareness that distinguishes transcendent trash auteurs like Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau and Neal Breen from garden-variety bad filmmakers?
I am happy to report that Verotika lives up and down to its reputation as the worst of the worst. It is a work of staggering, surreal ineptitude from a writer-director-cinematographer-composer-Executive Producer who most assuredly remains an amateur despite technically having made what can very generously be called a film.
The flamboyant awfulness and surreal miscalculation begins with the framing device. Verotika’s titillating trio of T&A-intensive terror tales is hosted by a low-rent Elvira wannabe named Morella who calls the boils and ghouls in the audience “darklings” and alternates between groaning wordplay and astonishing laziness.
For example, Morella introduces the final segment with the exquisitely half-assed, “And now, my darklings: our next story” while the sexy young sufferer in the first story, "The Albino Spider of Dajette” has eyes for nipples only for the punishing pun of Morella quipping after her story concludes, “There you go: the eyes have it.”
You have to know that “The ayes have it” is a procedural reference that, according to The Free Dictionary, means “affirmative votes are in the majority. Aye is an archaic or dialect word meaning 'yes', now used in standard speech only when voting. Compare with the noes have it (at no)” just for the “joke” to make sense. I’m not sure there’s any context in which Morella’s quip is actually funny.
"The Albino Spider of Dajette” opens with the titular tormented sex-worker making out with a French gentleman. We know he’s French because all of his dialogue is a variation on “Oui” before he gets Dajette’s top off and observes, in horror, “Your TEETS! They are looking at me!”
Then again, everyone in “The Albino Spider of Dajette” is French to a parodic degree. How comically thick and over the top are the French accents here? If the characters in "The Albino Spider of Dajette” were any more cartoonishly French, they’d be riding a bicycle, rocking a beret, wearing a striped shirt the colors of the French Flag and holding a baguette under one arm and a rolled up poster for a Jerry Lewis Film Festival under the other.
Ah, but Dajette has bigger problems than men being turned off by her eye-nipples. Every time Dajette goes to sleep a monstrous spider-man-monster whose “arms” look like sad rubber limbs slapping haphazardly together acts out her subconscious desire to, uh, sexually defile sex workers before breaking their necks.
This predilection for breaking necks earns him the nickname “Le Neck Breaker”, which epitomizes Verotika’s hilarious gift for stating the obvious, then stating it over and over again.
The Albino Spider-Man-Monster’s many arms let him coldly caress Dajette’s terrified face while simultaneously roughly groping her large breasts in ways that really drive home how turned on Glenn Danzig is by the idea of a giant albino spider monster having sex with a woman with eyes for nipples.
Why stop there? The spider-man-monster has so many arms that he could conceivably hold a woman’s face, fondle her heaving bosoms, text, take a conference call and play ping-pong, all at the same time.
Every sordid, blood-splattered tableau in Verotika represents someone’s sexual kink. That someone, I suspect, is Glenn Danzig. If he made the movie to give himself something to masturbate vigorously to then he undoubtedly succeeded. If he wanted to make a horror movie that wood scare people rather than make them guffaw, he failed egregiously.
Verotika begins with soft-core porn level acting as well as soft-core porn level production values. That’s appropriate because while Verotika might fancy itself a darkly comic horror anthology in the spirit of Tales From the Crypt—it’s even based on a comic book line Danzig owns called Verotik—it’s really just soft-core porn with the added advantage of gratuitous gore and blood.
The Albino Spider-Man Monster is DTF and then down to break necks. He’s insatiable in his lust for sex and violence. Courtney Stodden, who rose to infamy as Doug Hutchinson’s child bride classes up the joint as a streetwalker (French of course) who is sexually propositioned by The Albino Spider-Man Monster.
When the Albino Spider-Man Monster tells Stodden’s prostitute that he wants to sodomize her, she replies affirmatively, “Monsieur has good eyes. ASS FOOK is my speciality!” and then dies a horrible death when, true to form, he sodomizes her, then breaks her neck.
Dajette is very stupid but even she eventually realizes that the Albino Spider-Man Monster only kills while she’s asleep so she tries to stay awake by going to a pornographic movie.
"What is this film? It is only making sex!” she wonders aloud, shortly before falling asleep and being sexually assaulted in both her dreams and reality. The concept of someone needing to stay awake to thwart a supernatural monster is thrillingly original: I’d love to see what someone like Wes Craven would have done with it.
Dajette ends up defeating the Albino Spider-Man Monster by taking a fatal overdose, leading a detective to observe of her lifeless body to a colleague, “Sergeant, her breasts are eyes!”
End scene!
In the next vignette, “Change of Pace”, a murderous stripper known only as “Mystery Girl” goes around taking the faces of beautiful women she encounters by cutting them off, then adding them to her collection or wearing them to work at the strip club.
One of the many ways in which Verotika resembles Plan 9 From Outer Space lies in the fairly central role the police play in telling us what we already know in the most punishingly obvious ways.
For example, the Einsteins in “Change of Pace” use their Sherlock Holmes-level intellects to ascertain that the thirteen murders in which the corpses have their faces cut off might just be connected, possibly the work of some manner of face-stealer.
There is no twist in “Change of Pace.” Mystery Girl kills and kills and kills some more and then the segment is over. The same is true of the vignette that follows.
In the third segment and final insult,”Drukija Contessa of Blood”, the titular Contessa indulges a wicked addiction to bathing and drinking the blood of virgins as a way of preserving her beauty and youth.
Who needs botox when you can get better results from drinking from the jugulars of young maidens who have never known a man’s erotic touch?
Drukija bathes in the blood of virgins. Then she drinks the blood of virgins. Then she drinks the blood of virgins, bathes in the blood of virgins and, just to switch things up a little, very enthusiastically devours the still-beating heart of one of the virgins whose blood she has just bathed in.
Verotika can’t quite sustain the exquisite stupidity of its first segment but I thoroughly enjoyed having my intelligence, taste and judgment insulted by it for 89 blissfully oblivious minutes.
I worry that Danzig will be so discouraged by the reception Verotika received that he won’t make any more movies. It would be a damn shame if the Misfits frontman let his complete lack of talent keep him from doing what it turns out he’s spectacularly but enjoyably bad at.
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