Verotika (2019)

Dir. Glenn Danzig

Modern “so-bad-it’s-good” movies are hard to come by in 2019. The market is almost hilariously oversaturated with Direct-to-Streaming crap that’s either expectedly boring and inept, or so winking and ironically self-aware that it becomes painfully cringe inducing. Shielding one's eyes from the screen should be induced by horror or tension, not embarrassment by proxy. The point is that when filmmakers set out with the intention of making a movie that’s “so-bad-it’s good”, they are doomed to failure from the start because they are missing the fundamental point; sincerity and delusion. The joke is not that the filmmakers are playing dumb and trying to make the audience laugh, it’s that they’re not even in on the joke. People don’t like The Room, Birdemic, Troll 2, Manos, Neil Breen, Ed Wood etc. because they give they represent misunderstood, independent, outsider art; it’s because they find it amusing that the visionaries behind these films set out with billion dollar ideas, dreams of Hollywood-level stardom, and gross miscalculations in regard to any and all combinations of story structure, dialogue, editing, blocking, sound recording and mixing, performance, special effects, human emotion, recording formats, and set design. Audiences, even though they may not be filmmakers or film scholars themselves, know how movies are supposed to look, sound, and feel. They know how human beings interact with each other. They know how apartments are generally laid out and decorated. And they love to see people fail not miserably, but spectacularly.

Enter Glenn Danzig’s Verotika, which falls somewhere between miserable and spectacular. Sometimes it both, but really feels like it’s executing suicide drills along that scale throughout it’s runtime. Based on stories from the Misfits frontman’s comic publishing line of (almost) the same name, Verotika is an anthology horror featuring bare breasts, blood, eye-gouging, a face-stealing stripper, a spider man (but not the Spider-Man), a vampiric countess, a Crypt Keeper-esque hostess, and a woman with eyeballs for nipples. If the movie sounds like an unheralded bacchanal of violence and erotica, then expectations need to be tempered. It’s more like hanging out at a public bus station after 1am; dingy, kind of surreal, maybe a little silly, but not quite awful enough to be remarkable. Most of the movie is pretty run of the mill, on par with Direct-to-Video D-grade horror. That is to say it looks like cheap digital video, performances are uniformly terrible, the special effects are underwhelming, little attention is paid to set design, and it mostly just feels like the entire endeavor was an excuse for the director to point a camera at naked women and cover them in corn syrup. 

The building blocks for a cult classic trainwreck are all present; poorly written and delivered dialogue, hammy acting, questionable CGI, awkward eroticism, the inexplicable substitution of Los Angeles for Paris, complete with terrible French accents and Kepi adorned cops, and a murderous man-spider that looks like a cross between Mortal Kombat’s Goro and the main dude from Frisky Dingo (or one of the Engineers from Prometheus for those in the majority that has no idea what Frisky Dingo is). However, as compelling as all these elements might sound, they never quite congeal into something digestibly silly. A lot of the more gonzo elements are front-loaded into the movie’s first segment, leaving the back two feeling less kinetically engaging by comparison. The second segment is heavily bogged down by not one, but two strip routines that run the full length of two Danzig tracks. Maybe a strip dance is compelling when you’re physically there to witness is, but it doesn’t do much to enhance the pacing of a vignette. The final segment though, while facing even greater pacing issues than the second segment, shines something approaching glory, not in dialogue, costuming, or gonzo weirdness, but in the bizarre banality of it’s editing. Ostensibly a Medieval by way of Heavy Metal Elizabeth Bathory riff, there is no real plot to this final segment. A peasant girl is taken from her home so that The Countess can bath in her’s and other girls’ blood. And that’s what happens. Maybe it’s cognitive dampening wrought by the first two segments, but at this point the brain fails to recall if there was even any dialogue in this segment, if it was 15 or 50 minutes long. There were shots of The Countess bathing in blood, and a shot of her admiring her face in a mirror. Unremarkable if not for the fact that these shots held for minutes to the point of hilarity. Like a song that gets stuck in the head so long that it transcends annoyance and irritation and becomes delirious, incomprehensible, incredulous joy, and then runs that cycle two or three more times. There’s a moment in one of these shots that, without spoiling, elicited one of the stronger bouts of laughter from the audience, and rightfully so.

To be fair, it’s not 100% awful. There are some stylistic flourishes throughout the film. The narratives are somewhat dream-like, primary colored lighting permeates the first two segments, and there are even some shots that seem to have been composed with something in the neighborhood of artistic intent. During an interview after the screening, Danzig listed Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Luis Brunel, and Georges Franju among his influences. And while there are touches of those surrealist and psychedelic Euro-Horror aesthetics on display, it’s difficult to discern how much of it is intentional, and how much can be chalked up to technical ineptitude.

Verotika is an odd duck, even in its chosen genre (horror) and genre by cultural designation (best-worst). It’s certainly not on-the-mark enough to be taken seriously, not energetically batshit enough to qualify as a facemelter, and not engagingly weird enough to qualify as a brainmelter, instead sitting somewhere on the line where ineptitude becomes entertainment and crossing it only sporadically. There’s not enough bloody carnage to satisfy gorehounds, not enough sex stuff to satisfy perverts, and no genuine scares, compelling story or characters to satisfy casual horror or Misfits/Danzig fans. Verotika will soon be dumped onto VOD and disc, but has finished its theatrical run, which is kind of a shame. This is a movie best suited to be seen in a theater, preferably a theater that serves beer, late at night, with dozens of drunken punks. To put things in perspective, the most entertaining part of Verotika came at about 15 minutes into the screening, when in a coincidental meta-commentary on the quality of the movie itself, perhaps arranged in the cosmic ether by the forces that appreciate the ironic enjoyment of bad movies, the playback started to skip, freeze, and ultimately cut directly to the end credits, eliciting first confusion, then applause, laughter, and finally shadow puppets. In those fleeting moments before the movie reset and resumed, many became one, bonded by the shared experience of delightful incredulity at the display of misguided and unrefined sincerity before them.