So there’s this indie/cult film that’s been getting a lot of word-of-mouth called Verotika. A few people I follow on YouTube made videos on it and I’m always up for a crazy, looney-pants attempt at… something… so I gave it a rent. Turns out the movie is written and directed by Glenn Danzig (yes, of Mother fame) and is based on his erotic-tinged horror comic (called Verotik). How good or bad can it be? Spoiler alert: very very very very bad.
The film contains a trilogy of horror shorts… or “horror” since it is too inept to even pretend to actually have any scares. It has a lot of blood and the stories have horror themes, but nothing in this movie works… or is good… or is competent… or is acted well… to even hint at any mood or feelings beyond boredom and contempt.
From a pure film-making perspective, just everything is terrible. Scenes trail off as though nobody knows when to cut, the actors often don’t seem to know what they should be doing, special effects are terrible, make-up effects are terrible, creature effects are full of obvious, ragged edge lines, and sets and props are shoddy. There’s even a scene in a movie theater that clearly shows the flicking light from the projector is actually just a light set in front of a rotating fan… creates the right illusion of a picture being played but not when you show it on camera.
In other words, avoid this garbage. It’s so bad I started to wonder if maybe it was intentionally bad… but if so, it should have been more consistently so-bad-its-good. It’s not… I think it’s just wildly incompetent. Glenn Danzig is no Rob Zombie, I think is the take-away.
Score: 46