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Review: Glenn Danzig’s ‘Verotika’ Is A Madhouse Horror Anthology
There’s a fine line between horror and comedy. One person’s fear can be another’s joke. Sort of like when Homer Simpson tells Mel Brooks he loved Young Frankenstein. “Scared the hell out of me!” By extension, a movie eliciting the exact opposite response from the intention of the filmmakers can lead to a cult phenomenon. This is already evident in rock icon Glenn Danzig’s feature film debut: Verotika.
While I enjoy Danzig’s music, I never really followed his career and only learned that the film was adapted on a comic book series of the same name that Danzig created, so I went in as blind as possible. And it’s a good thing I did because the film sucker-punched me like a brick from the heavens. Verotika is a horror anthology split into three tales of terror. Before the film, Danzig made a brief introduction, citing inspiration from the likes of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. Which made sense as the film went on with a clearly Euro influence. The story begins with the devilish Morella gouging out the eyes of a beautiful blonde bound in her basement before the titles drop. It’s a strong start that goes immediately downhill.
The three vignettes of Verotika aren’t necessarily stories. Things happen, but story structure, if any, is limited. It could almost be considered arthouse if it wasn’t actually trying to tell these stories. The first, “The Albino Spider of Dajette” follows the titular Dajette in her native France (with every character speaking English with French accents) who after being rejected by another man because of her deformity, namely eyes growing on her breasts, cries. From her breasts. The tears mutate a white spider into a hulking six-armed brute (also with an accent) who becomes obsessed with Dajette and kills people she secretly doesn’t like… or people in general. Under the serial killer moniker of ‘The Neckbreaker.’
Next comes “Change of Face” where a serial killer woman stalks the city of angels, ripping off the faces of beautiful women so she can collect them and wear them at her job as a stripper. The police are baffled and curse frequently. Lastly, there’s “Drukija Contessa of Blood”, a more traditional Euro horror story following the evil contessa, Drukija as she collects ample virgins form the countryside so she may bathe in their blood.
With the exception of the first story, these tales of Verotika have no real endings and very little drive. There’s murders, nudity, sex, and sleaze, but not in a fashion that can be structured. We’re looking into the mind and Id of Danzig and it looks exactly like the comic books. The acting is silly and jumps between over the top ham to dull surprise even in reaction to mutilation. The pacing jumps from frantic cuts to glacier slow focuses on everything from tantalizing women to a handful of grapes. Perhaps one of the most poignant moments in the movie is Contessa Drukija bonding with a wolf over some spare virgin meat.
Verotika is a vision in that it’s exactly the kind of movie the creator wanted to make and it gives us insight into their process. One that is borderline incomprehensible to anyone else. This is a film destined for cult attraction. I all but guarantee Verotika will be populating midnight screenings when it officially comes out in October. This is a crowd movie, one that elicits riffs, laughter, ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’. This will be a movie people bond over. Time will tell how mainstream audiences will react, but if history has taught us anything it’s to never underestimate a weird movie’s resonance with the public.
*Jacob Davison originally wrote this review in June 2019.
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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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