Glenn Danzig may be an icon of metal, but he’s a pariah of movies — judging from his first feature as writer and director, Verotika.
Based on stories from Danzig’s own adults-only comics imprint, Verotik, the horror anthology holds one surprise: that the horned woman introducing each segment is not named Verotika, but Morella. Played by porn star Kayden Kross (Manuel Creampies Their Asses 3), Morella begins the film by pushing her thumbs through a woman’s eyeballs until those sockets are pitch-black.
In hindsight, I think Morella did the poor woman a favor.
First up in this triumvirate of train wrecks is “The Albino Spider of Dajette,” in which a Frenchwoman with a pink Wonder Twins hairdo (porn star Ashley Wisdom, My Stepsister Squirts 3) has a problem: Her giant breasts have eyeballs where areola should be, which scares off would-be sexual partners. “Not again!” she pouts as another guy bolts from her apartment. A single tear from her eye somewhere causes a tiny white CGI spider to morph into some sort of naked spider-man (Scotch Hopkins, Virus of the Dead) coated in Liquid Paper and keen at snappin’ necks of sex workers.
In “Change of Face” — it’s a pun! — one of the star strippers at Pussy Kats is Mystery Girl (Rachel Alig, The Cleaning Lady). She’s earned this nickname because she keeps her hideously scarred face covered throughout her routine. Off the stage and on the street, her hobbies include killing pretty ladies, peeling off her victims’ faces and tacking those skin masks to her bedroom wall.
Finally — repeat: finally — Danzig goes historical in “Drukija, Contessa of Blood.” Obviously based on the 16th-century royal serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, Drukija (Alice Haig, Chillerama) orders her village’s virgins to be rounded up so she can slit them open and bathe in their blood for supposed rejuvenating properties (“In my skin, there is tingle, Sheska!”). By the end, Drukija is lugging around a sacrifice’s head that looks lopped off a RealDoll — one perhaps retired from the Danzig tour bus.
Although the cast numbers many adult entertainers, everyone looks like a porn star, thanks to barren sets no better than a school play and mostly amateurish performances that unknowingly teeter the bar toward self-parody. In horror, hideous acts are all part of the show, but Verotika is all about those acts; the film has no other purpose or point. “Albino Spider” is the only segment — note I don’t call it a “story” — with anything resembling a conclusion, whereas the other two simply call it quits after subjecting viewers to an agonizing amount of screen time spent watching repetitive tasks.
I’d like to think even fans of the man’s music hold a higher standard for what qualifies as a movie. Yet somewhere, someone is not only watching Verotika, but enjoying it — and possibly even masturbating to the part where tabloid fixture Courtney Stodden loses her phony, polycarbonate visage. —Rod Lott
Apologies to Brandon Cronenberg, but I find it impossible to approach his films without also considering those of his famous father, David. It’s not a comparison, nor a matter of who’s “better”; I see their shared DNA linking their cinema, with the younger continuing the work of the elder, even if the elder has yet to retire. That said, while Brandon’s second film, 
