Movie Review : Verotika (2019)
If you’re under 30 and have no idea who Glenn Danzig is, don’t worry. He’s a 64 years old rock singer who hasn’t released relevant music since you were 5. When his name surfaced in the headlines prior to his directorial debut Verotika, there were a slight buzz around his first original artistic endeavor over two decades. Danzig’s imaginary and aesthetic had real potential. Based on his musical legacy, that’s what I thought. But Verotika got laughed out of screening rooms around America and called the spiritual successor to The Room by media outlets. With good reason, I might add.
To say Verotika is not good would be an understatement. It’s The Room without any of the good-natured insanity. Not only it’s terrible, but it takes itself very, very seriously. It’s the most pointlessly vile thing I’ve ever seen.
Verotika has three segments: The Albino Spider of Dajette, Change of Face and Drujika: Countess of Blood. The first tells the story of an eight-armed mutant power rapist (Scotch Hopkins), the middle segment is about a mysterious stripper (Rachel Alig) who peels off the faces of young women and the grand finale is based on the life of Erzebeth Bathory, a hungarian countess who believed that bathing in the blood of virgins would bring her eternal youth. None of these stories deserve a deep-dive in themselves, but Verotika is nonetheless worth discussing in a more… conceptual way?
Verotika consists in 90 minutes of women being raped and killed in a variety of ways. Boobs and blood are nothing new in cinema. Old school Italian directors like Dario Argento and Mario Bava did it decades before Glenn Danzig and if you want to be angry at misogyny in horror, be angry at them first. But these guys were at least trying to tell a story. What makes Verotika so fucked is that it’s a loosely coherent excuse for a man to put his darkest, most deranged fantasies in film. Rapes and murders are the reason why this movie exists.
Take Drujika: Countess of blood. It consists literally in 30 minutes of the character slitting wrists, throats and beheading young girls, intercut but long scenes of her either bathing in blood or erotically rubbing it on her face. No matter how I was trying to understand what the idea behind it was, the only thing I could come up with was: well, Glenn Danzig must find that sexy. There’s a scene where Drujika eats the heart of a living girl for no reason whatsoever. It is the only scene the girl is in and there’s no mention or her either before or after. She exists outs of aesthetic necessity.
Danzig just wanted to film an underage girl having her heart eaten out. That’s what’s so fucking creepy about this movie. These scenes don’t even try to appeal to anybody. They exist because they turn an elderly rocker on. Change of Face has so many ugly, drawn-out scenes of massively tattooed strippers dancing that don’t add anything to Verotika that you end up thiking they must exist because Glenn Danzig finds that sexy. Verotika is a weird hybrid between an autoerotic fantasy and an unedited art student project. It’s not art of it’s meant to arouse only one person.
It’s masturbation.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against erotica or gore movies and I’m not the quickest draw on social justice issues. But Verotika is the celebration of someone’s dark, deranged fantasies. The one you keep to yourself in order not to alienate the few people in your life. It’s not something to celebrate and put on film. It’s not even well-made either. It looks cheap and it’s littered with technical problems. So what’s the point? If you want a good breakdown of how technically incompetent Verotika is, Red Letter Media spent an hour breaking it down.
Verotika is a sordid and artless way of spending 90 minutes. I’ve seen close to 2,000 movies in my life and it might very well be the worst. It doesn’t even classify as a so-bad-it’s-good movie. The only reason why I would even consider watching it again is to play a drinking game with friend and even that would make me want to take a shower. Glenn Danzig is old and has serious issues with his sexuality. That’s about the only takeaway I have from Verotika. The worst part is that he’s planning to do it again. Apparently, he wants the whole world to celebrate his fucked up sexuality.
0/10
