1900HOTDOG

Upsetting Day: Verotika

Added 2021-09-14 12:01:01 +0000 UTC

October is coming, when I love a good horror movie, which is why we’re dissecting Glenn Danzig’s Verotika in September. Heed ye my conservatively chosen words, sojourner: Verotika is the worst movie ever made. We all know musician Danzig as a Frank Frazetta painting given life to slay the Serpent God of Self-Awareness, but director Danzig is a concussed 13-year-old processing his parents' divorce by masturbating with a leather sock. His anthology tinkers in the devil’s domain by merging horror and erotica, but summons instead this darque trinity:

Combined, this triforce of garbage could break the world; luckily, this movie is so boring its own framing device gets lost in thot. Your cryptkeeper tonight is Morella, which is a Danzigian name meaning “Death princess who’d rather be somewhere else.”

Okay, let’s dive into the first tale, because I can’t prepare you for this bullshit any better than the last five years of asking why God turned His back on this world already has.

One of these is Dajette:

We meet her fellating Ed Pornton, but things take a real “no means maybe” turn:

Fortunately, the body’s natural defenses roll 20 on Deformity to repel his attack:

Her nipple-eyes are a conceit never explained. It’s like Danzig read The Sandman, and asked, “What if...The Corinthian but not a gay-mo? Oh, and BOOOOOOOBS!” as he ejaculated blood all over the tombstone he uses as a desk.

Gropehands flees into the night, and Dajette weeps to see her “cute” assailant go. And yes, her ocu-titties cry too, dropping the lac- into lachrymal glands:

But! The magical boob-hoo juice splashes a spider, and mutates it:

Bachelor #8, come on DOWN!

Bachelor #8 is an arachno-incubus sprung to life in the milky tears of a fetish model, giving him the proportional sadism and sexual impetuousness of a man. Say hello to...LE NECKBREAKER!

Droning about the impulses Dajette hides from herself, he kills her roommate. Hey, isolating and controlling behavior on the first date! Who can say no? And would a man in Verotika even listen?

Then begins a long stretch of him murdering random women, sometimes inserting his pedipalps into them. Again, he claims these are Dajette’s secret desires. So it’s Murders in the Rue Morgue meets Jekyll & Hyde by way of Elliot Rodgers: The Spectacular Spider-Man. Okay.

Le Neckbreaker is trapped in the Dreaming until Dajette sleeps, for some reason, so she struggles to stay conscious in a world cleared by the FDA to induce medical comas.

She mopes around a fetish shoot while other models mock her for finding her best friend’s dead body. You’d think these are the women she secretly desires her murder-tulpa to kill in her name, but no, he’s on a whoremongering tour of Paris. In Verotika‘s cinematic language, the word for cruelty is the same as plot armor.

To stay awake, Dajette goes to a porn theater and immediately drops into slumber for the third time in 24 hours. I mean...in Danzig-time “immediately” means 90 seconds of watching this woman watch a better film.

Same, Dajette. Same.

It’s called “Les Nue Sans Visage” which is A) a mistranslation of “The Nude(s) Without a Face” and B) Glenn’s idea of some Tarantino shit where Dajette is watching our next vignette. Even the characters in this movie are falling asleep watching this movie.

Napping in a dark room full of erect men goes very badly for her:

Look at the precision of these converging rapscallions! Five minutes ago they were strokin’ it in public like America’s sweetheart Fred Willard—suddenly they’re in a violent conspiracy with strangers! It’s just the instinct you’re born with in the Verotika universe, where Paris is a Pepe Le Pew cartoon whose Black Cat is already exhausted from fleeing Spider-Man’s unsolicited albino dick.

Happily, Dajette wanders out of her own personal tragedy and into Cafe Stupide, so a waiter can sneer at the script with his pronunciation of “Le Neckbreaker.” He knows what film he’s in, better than the director does:

Nothing else happens in this scene. The Albino Spider is a tale about a relentlessly destructive male libido born from magical titty tears, and somehow the entire story feels like a Liverpool art student film called DOLDRUMS #12 (My Breath Redeeming).

Dajette gulps enough pills to finish the job that the script started, and calls the police. As she drifts to sleep the Albino Spider shows up to call her a bitch, which tracks. I guess he’s always in her brain even when he’s out octo-strangling? You can get coherence or a quick exit from this tale. I say Dajette picked right.

Les gendarmes bust in, guns technically blazing. There is no escape for Le Neckbreaker! Dajette’s death traps him in this incredibly stupid world. Boy, can I relate.

All this death could have been avoided if we taught men to hear and obey women’s boundaries, and not to body shame. But if you think that’s the message of the story, know that there are 10 men in this nightmare world, four of them are rapists, and three of the “good” ones only encounter Dajette in death. Given half a chance, that’s a 57% assault rate at minimum, and I didn’t count the spider-demon. None of them die.

Back to Morella. She plucks a woman’s peepers out, then snores, “There you go. The EYES have it…”

BOOOOOOOO!

This incurious monster is the world’s leading practitioner of mu-tit-illation, yet she gives it the emotional flavor of balsa wood. If this is erotica, what is sex with Danzig like? You roleplay as Lamashtu until he punches a wall and whispers a muffled “Mother” into the pillow without ever having moved his hips?

At least quips that sound sadistically clever to morons befit the main flaw of our next segment...

If you’ve read the Verotik comics that premise this film, I’m sorry. But before the blood clot made you black out, maybe you noticed all the extreme close-ups of characters’ faces spewing meaningless trash talk? So it is with Mystery Girl, the face-flensing stripper who embodies the pointlessness of Verotika.

As “The Face-Ripper” she dons a new face every day, then hides it under a mask that shows only her scarred, unchanging eyes. Symbolism? No! This character is God's rejected first draft of the idiot -- and that makes her the smartest fool in Danzigland.

This necromancy masquerading as cinema dilates time to achieve the impossible: making one song last forever in a strip club. Dancers bob idly to a tune about leaving town that's so boring, it’s written in the key of Z. After three minutes and a lifetime, Mystery Girl takes the stage to a Danzig track that drowns out everything else. Symbolism? Yes, but unintentional.

Men offer her money, but the darkness in her soul dances for free:

We meet a policeman named Simmering White Rage, somehow the worst character in this movie about people who use sex as a murder weapon. He resembles nine boiled picnic hams meat-glued into a Van Heusen suit.

It will be a few years before social media mints a word for how I hate this cop character. He...voidbores? Unfuriates? Grrr-sloshes? Unlikeable Hank Schrader here joined the force because he missed his calling as the brute in every porno who's weirdly angry about having sex with a woman half his age and a third his size.

Seriously, he looks like the one carbuncle on Joe Rogan's neck fat that listens to Michael Savage. I've been in comics a long time, and I can recognize a guy who worships Captain America while espousing all of the Red Skull's misreadings of Nietzsche.

--Drat, while I was drowning in weary rage for Sgt. Gorillatits, Mystery Girl killed again!

It’s the exact scene we already saw, but the victim’s a worse actress.

Then we’re back at the strip club repeating THAT exact scene but now she’s...haunted by her kills?

Then we’re back at the murder for a repeat of ANOTHER exact scene, ad-libbed this ti--Oh no, are we Groundhoggin’?

The Tautological Detective concludes that she steals faces because she wants faces. And how does he identify the killer?

Turns out the “sly” villain dropped a business card from her G-string’s many pockets at the scene. And the big toe with an ingrown face who’s hunting her isn’t even the one who finds it! One moment, two humiliating displays of incompetence. Oscar-winning screenplays yearn for the storytelling efficiency that Tits Gettin’ Stabbed: The Movie here rolls drunkenly into.

He bullies his way backstage, where beautiful women cover for their colleague who murders beautiful women. That’s when the film editing falls to a three-year-old who hasn’t quit trying to swallow Duplo blocks.

“I know you’re the Face Ripper!” he grumble-sighs. “Do you think I’m dumb enough to fall for that crap?” comes her reply. She gets the drop on him, but this RPG goes turn-based with an impossible shot:

She limps away gutshot, but he just stands there inventing new swears for the vagina.

It feels dismissive to say Danzig has issues with women when they’re all three of his protagonists, but every female role is a sex-worker, virgin, or the lady making their bloody deaths insultingly dull.

Months later “Mysteria” is still hiding her face while showcasing her identifying scars. And she’s going to dance for two more minutes while you go make popcorn.

Back at the torture ranch, Morella tells exasperating -- well, I don’t know if you’d say “jokes.” More like “connotative phrases” -- for murders you already watched. She can’t tell a joke to end someone’s life. And then we sink into the portion of the movie from which some part of our souls will never escape...

This is it. This is the worst one. It’s a supercut of Keeping Up With Lady Bathory that makes a village full of knockout blonde virgins look as erotic as a dry sneeze. This entire installment is just B-roll they shot waiting for Glenn to arrive on set, not knowing he got arrested for public exposure in front of a butcher’s window.

A minute. A full minute of Drukija smearing her face. I don't know why we're trying to solve cold fusion when we can just utilize the friction generated by Danzig stroking himself to dehydration every time a woman cuts her legs shaving. Here she asks a peasant girl if “You are virkin?”

Now then: in high school English, my teacher gave us a French poem that demonstrated some works are objectively terrible. Its shrill lines begin:

Corpse blood!

Wretched, festering corpse blood!

O o o o z i n g

Etc. I tell this anecdote so you know my expertise in dubbing “Drukija” the worst corpse-blood art ever produced. Behold the bath scene:

That’s six minutes of your life! Danzig is a filmmaker with the vision to order a minotaur skeleton tub, but the impairment to think opening its Ikea box is as good as assembling it.

At one point a bonus “virkin” gets her throat cut and nothing changes! Who is this ambient bloodshed for? Is there a serial killer out there who fancies softcore snuff tonight? Does it play on TVs at vampire spas? Its only clear beneficiaries are the yeast infections thriving in that corn syrup bath, and that’s because they’re uncredited.

Do you think that GIF is on a loop? It is not. Two cursed minutes of mirror awe, then she juices a woman like a lime.

I dare you to rearrange the scenes in “Drukija” and see if you can change the story. The outline for this script is a Czech translation of the coroner’s report for the Black Dahlia.

After three actual human-time minutes of riding a horse and traipsing through the underbrush, Drukija feeds a wolf. It has the good sense to leave while she’s still nattering about how badass they both are.

Another day, another maiden. Drukija eats her heart out and I feel nothing. She burns through virgins like a spring Birthright trip. This is Beetle Bailey for cannibals; you always know what gag is coming, and somehow it still underperforms.

A great head prop, but no blood on the axe; the hyper-focus on killing women has begun to consume secondary details. Is this entire film a magic spell to break the simulation’s rendering rate?

She takes the head to meet its friends, and we see them seeing them.

That’s it. That’s the final shot sped up 400%. And so we drag our feet into the center of this cinematic hell.

We found it, gang. The worst movie ever made. Verotika is uninterested in its own why; it’s too boobulatory for tension, and too stabberoony to arouse. Then it wanders from both pursuits to chase a butterfly whose wings look like Misfits skulls. The only positive thing about its existence is it distracted a few school shooters long enough to miss the bus.

Let the record show this film is as confused by its crimes as the rest of us. Death is a tale told by an idiot whose wordplay dreams of one day meeting a pun. Why are we here? Why did I do this to you? Nothing means anything. We won’t go to Hell when we die. We already spent an eternity in Verotika.

Brendan is already the perfect mix of horror and eroticism, thank you very much.