In short: Verotika (2019)

Most of us will understand the impulse of someone pretty good in a certain kind of art wanting to work in a different one because they love it just so damn much, so in theory, I applaud Glenn Danzig’s attempt to add “writer/director” to his roles as (sometimes great) musician and editor of “erotic horror” comics that are neither erotic nor horror, though certainly horrible. Alas, then I make the mistake of actually trying to watch the resulting anthology movie-like object (of course based on some of the comics), and the applause quickly turns not so much into the boos and jeers of most people I’ve seen writing about this thing, but an increasingly intense series of yawns.

I could work with the coterie of porn actresses Danzig has hired mangling every single line of Danzig’s already terrible dialogue; after all, even a master thespian could not get anything better out of it than tears of pain from the audience. I could perhaps live with Danzig’s inability to properly ape the stylish kind of wonderfully illogical European horror movie he (as do I) so obviously admires; though it would have been nice if someone had explained to him how to frame scenes so that the cardboard sets they are taking place in don’t look quite as much like cardboard or at least look like cardboard in interesting ways.


Or rather, I could have done this if the film were at least properly weird. It starts out well enough with a woman suffering from love troubles caused by the fact that she has eyes on her breasts instead of nipples, but these first couple of minutes really are as far as genuine strangeness goes, with every single tale devolving into a series of pointless scenes of a bit of nudity and amateur gore that never go anywhere, have never encountered the idea of mood nor that of plot, and go on and on and on forever (you really can’t imagine how long a scene can go on before you’ve gone through the crucible of this film), until each tale stops without ever having found anything even vaguely amounting to a climax. Insert sex joke here - you can start making your own fun right now, you’re going to need it if you decide to inflict this on yourself. If a viewer makes it that far, the endless blood bathing scenes in the “Drukija Contessa of Blood” (the lack of punctuation is from the film, of course) segment will either finally put them to sleep or make them angry enough to never touch anything with the name of “Glenn Danzig” on it again. After this, I’ve started to rethink my loathing for the body of work of Rob Zombie, for in comparison, that guy’s the Martin Scorsese of horror.