I’ve written at length about what makes a good bad movie, but what makes a BAD bad movie? This is what I’d like to talk about in today’s review because I think I found the perfect example. Here is a movie that is so bad, so incompetent, so mind-numbingly lazy, that I can’t just overlook its flaws and give it the benefit of the doubt like I normally would. This is a movie that is insultingly and aggressively terrible. Yes folks, I’m talking about VEROTIKA.
Quick Recap! When COVID shut down everything in early 2020, I started an online bad movie night get-together with some friends that we eventually dubbed “Bad Movie Monday”. The premise was simple: We’d torture each other every Monday with the worst trash we could find, tell a few jokes, cheer each other up, and in the process maybe discover some weird obscure cinema that we might never have seen any other way. This series of reviews will feature highlights of those night, along with some of my own personal favorite trash, so you can all share in the fun and maybe get some ideas for your own movie night.
Before I begin to eviscerate the film, I want to get a few things out of the way. Number one is that I derive no pleasure from this review. I’m not smiling as I write this. Well… not much anyway. Number two is that I don’t begrudge writer/producer/director Glenn Danzig for wanting to make a film. It was obviously his dream to become a filmmaker one day and I would never stomp on someone’s dream. Number three is that I WANTED TO LIKE THIS FILM. I really did. This review isn’t me trying to insult or slander Glenn Danzig. This is me giving an honest opinion about what a mess this is. You see, I often give a pass to bad movies, because they’re made by people with no skills or resources or experience, but who are acting in good faith. So, as long as can see that they’re trying, I’m okay with the fact that they’re making trash. Glenn Danzig does not seem to be trying. At least, not very hard, and there is no excuse for that. The man isn’t some kid straight out of film school working on a $5,000 budget. He’s been in the music business for 45 years. He has contacts. He has friends. He had a one million dollar budget! One phone call and he could have gotten some professionals to help him out, but what good is help if you don’t listen to anyone?
By the way, in case you don’t know this already, it’s important to mention that Glenn Danzig is a rather legendary figure in music. He was the lead singer and songwriter for the horror punk band The Misfits, and then later the horror punk/metal/goth band Samhain. Finally, he formed the eponymous band Danzig whose first four albums are some of the greatest heavy metal music you’ve ever heard. I feel his later stuff declined in quality, but he had a hell of a great run between 1977 and 1994. So I can’t say enough good things about the guy when it comes to his music. When it comes to his filmmaking though…
Look, I have nothing but sympathy for how intense and chaotic a film shoot can be. Writing a film can be fun. Editing a film can be fun. However, filming a film can be an absolute nightmare. Because you’re always one mistake or instance of bad luck away from a catastrophe that can result in having to quickly rework almost every aspect of the movie that you just spent six months planning. Resulting in whole scenes that were meant to be shot having to be scrapped, new scenes having to be written to replace them, and everything that you’ve changed having to fit with the footage that’s already in the can. What’s worse is that more often than not you only have a few days, and sometimes only a few hours, to fix the whole debacle because you’re on a schedule and the clock doesn’t stop ticking just for you. Oh, and depending on how unlucky you are, this can happen more than once during the production of your film. However, that is the nature of the beast. It can break even the strongest and most confident soul. It can be depressing and stressful and exhausting work that requires immense commitment. It’s an art form that can be incredibly rewarding if you stick with it and do your best, but it’s not for everybody, and the people who go into it thinking that it’ll be easy are in for one hell of a shock.
Enter Glenn Danzig.
Verotika feels like Danzig spent most of the production going “Yeah, whatever, that’ll do.” after every take and THAT is what I don’t like about this movie. He seems to have put zero effort into this endeavor. The film makes so many basic mistakes that I don’t even know where to start. There are scenes where the camera’s auto-zoom has been accidentally left on. There are scenes where you can hear crowd noise behind the characters. There are scenes where the actors don’t know what to do because they haven’t been given the proper direction. There are scenes where the camera wobbles. There are blatantly missing scenes. There are scenes that, very obviously, are unedited raw footage of the actor’s entire take without any trims. At some point, the sheer volume of non-stop blunders stop being “mistakes” and start to be a larger sign of laziness and incompetence. I don’t know what happened or why, and I’m not going to hazard a guess, but at some point everyone involved in this stopped giving a damn.
So what’s the story Jeremy?
The film consists of three segments and a wraparound story. Let’s run through them.
MORELLA (The Wraparound)
An anonymous terrified girl is strung up in a dark dungeon while a sinister woman named Morella walks towards her. Morella then slowly pokes the girl’s eyes out, Three Stooges style, to which the girl reacts to by screaming “MY EYES!!!” which I suspect is something that many of the people who watched this turd were also screaming throughout the movie. Morella then returns to introduce each segment.
THE ALBINO SPIDER OF DAJETTE.
We open on a huge-boobed girl called Dajette having weirdly tame softcore sex with a guy, but because she has eyes instead of nipples the guy is horrified and leaves. This sexual rejection makes Dajette cry from her boob eyes, which brings to life a giant horny talking man spider who immediately starts raping and killing women whenever Dajette falls asleep.
CHANGE OF FACE
The second story in this anthology is about a stripper called Mystery Girl who literally cuts off and steals women’s faces because her own face is covered in what looks like mild eczema. Well, I say stripper, but she wears a thong and pasties and mask and a CAPE onstage. So she’s not exactly stripping. To be honest I’m not sure what the hell she’s doing. She just twirls round and round and round the stripper pole, never takes any clothes off, and does this weird arm waving dance while glaring at the patrons. Seriously, if I saw a stripper do that I’d be concerned, not aroused.
This time there’s almost a hint of a plot, as the police are investigating the murders. A lot of reviewers have said that the first segment is the best and that the movie goes downward from there, but I have to disagree and say that the second segment is actually the best. It certainly has the best acting of the three, and the stripping scenes are enthusiastic at least.
DRUKIJA COUNTESS OF BLOOD
The third segment is by far the worst of the three stories and perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever watched in my entire life. I’ll sum it up really quickly. We open in some vague medieval setting where a Queen called Drukija, who is basically like Elizabeth Bathory, kills peasant girls and bathes in their blood. That. Is. It. That’s the only thing that happens. The other two stories, as thin as they were, at least had some token attempt at plot. This one feels like the entire script consisted of a post-it note with TITS written on it. It’s shockingly empty.
THOUGHTS
So, now that we know what the movie is about, we come to my favorite part of the review where I list ten thoughts I had while watching this trash:
#1 – No review of this film would be complete without mentioning the really really really really terrible French accents on display in THE ALBINO SPIDER OF DAJETTE, because this entire segment is taking place in France for some reason. It’s like Glenn just showed his actors one of the Pink Panther movies and said “DO THAT!” Here’s a pro tip Glenn: When you’re working with actors who already find acting to be difficult, don’t give them the extra challenge of an accent.
#2 – Not even fifteen minutes into the movie and it becomes obvious that nobody behind the camera knew what blocking was or establishing shots were. In one scene a character is shown running towards the right of the screen only to then cut to a scene of them running to the left.
#3 – When Dajette goes to a café she encounters the world’s most intense waiter. I don’t know if the actor was nervous or if Glenn directed him to act that way, but holy hell man. Switch to decaf. I will say it livened up the segment though.
#4 – At one point in the first segment, we are shown the police trying to bust down a door in order to enter someone’s apartment. However, it’s obvious that the filmmakers only had one door to bust down because nobody thought of the fact that when you break a door in a movie you have to show it being broken from the outside AND the inside. Thus, you need two doors at least.
#5 – The second segment, CHANGE OF FACE, arguably has the best acting in the whole movie. Sean Kanan, who plays the detective investigating the murders and face stealing, is very decent and a lot of fun to watch. He has a soap opera background so you can tell he’s used to being thrown in front of the camera with no direction and no script. His professionalism was really appreciated.
#6 – CHANGE OF FACE also has some great dialogue. Well, maybe the word great is pushing it, but it got some genuine laughs out of me anyway. At one point one of the cops tells the detective investigating the murders “Cause of Death. Apparent shock and loss of blood.” and the detective goes “NICE!” At another point the detective wants to go backstage at the strip club where Mystery Girl works and one of the strippers blocks his way and goes “Where do you think you’re going? No people allowed. There’s naked girls back there!” and the detective goes “Very funny, there’s naked girls out here too.”
#7 – There is one fun little bit in the third segment, DRUKIJA COUNTESS OF BLOOD. The actress who plays Sheska (Natalia Borowski) is a blast to watch. She plays the character as being so overly enthusiastic about all the murder and mayhem that she has a borderline orgasm every time someone is killed. It’s not much, but her performance helps make this dreary slog tolerable at times.
#8 – If I can give the film another bit of grudging praise, it’s that the cinematography isn’t as bad as you’d expect. Many scenes in the film look almost good, as still images. They look terrible once you un-pause the film, but when no one is moving or saying anything there’s a legitimately cool old school comic book vibe to the thing. Danzig was going for a Creepshow kind of feel and he almost pulls it off.
#9 – Wait, is that Caroline Williams in the DRUKIJA segment? Yes it is! She’s literally only in one scene so I’m guessing she had a bigger role originally and noped out of this mess. Can’t say I blame her.
#10 – Danzig also scored the film and assembled the soundtrack. It’s, um… eclectic to be sure. However, I do have a certain amount of fondness for it. It’s what the movie is trying to be. Loud, obnoxious, adolescent and in-your-face. It’s the sonic equivalent of seventies boogie van with a naked chick riding a dragon painted on the side.
Was it actually bad?
Hell yes! It was awful! It was awful to watch once, and I had to watch this four times!!! It was like having to go back to the dentist for another root canal. This movie fails on several fronts, but the worst of which is that it is simply boring as hell. It is paced incredibly slowly and is way too damn long. When you’re making a bad movie, proper pacing and length is essential. Even more so than if you were making a good movie. Don’t have long scenes of filler. Cut out any scene where no one is talking for a long time. Stuff like that. You want your film to be tighter than a nun on a Greek vacation. It won’t improve your film, but it’ll make it more fun to watch at least.
