Verotika is what happens when someone says, “How hard can making a movie be?” and then proves, in excruciating detail, that the answer is “very.”
Written, directed, and scored by Glenn Danzig—yes, that Danzig—this 2019 anthology horror film is based on his Verotik comics and feels exactly like you’d expect: like a 14-year-old edgelord’s notebook doodles were given a budget and absolutely zero adult supervision. It’s not so much a movie as it is three music videos that lost the music, the plot, and the will to live.
And yet, in its own catastrophic way, it’s… unforgettable. Like carbon monoxide poisoning.
Three Stories, No Survivors (Emotionally Speaking)
Verotika is split into three segments, each introduced by a hostess who looks like a Spirit Halloween employee cursed to speak only in exposition. The stories are:
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“The Albino Spider of Dajette” – Parisian sex worker with eyeball nipples accidentally manifests a murderous spider-man.
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“Change of Face” – Stripper steals faces from other women. That’s it. That’s the plot.
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“Drukja Contessa of Blood” – Diet Elizabeth Báthory kills virgins and bathes in their blood, but with less nuance and more baby oil.
On paper, these sound like grindhouse gold: sleazy, pulpy, comic-book horror. In practice, they’re like three half-remembered dreams someone recounted while drunk, and Danzig wrote them down word-for-word and shot them without ever asking, “Should I?”
Segment 1: The Albino Spider of Dajette – Web of What the Hell
We open in Paris, allegedly. I say “allegedly” because everything looks like it was shot on a single soundstage with the vague suggestion of “European red-light district”: red gel lights, one street corner, and accents that sound like everyone learned French from a perfume commercial.
Dajette (Ashley Wisdom) is a sex worker cursed with eyeballs for nipples—a concept that is somehow the least bizarrely staged thing in this segment. She’s embarrassed by them (understandable) and cries onto a nearby albino spider, which then transforms into an eight-armed humanoid who goes out at night snapping sex workers’ necks like he’s auditioning for Cirque du Soul-Less.
The Albino Spider himself looks like the lovechild of a mime and a failed Power Rangers villain. He wears white body paint, rubbery extra arms, and stalks around in slow, deliberate movements that scream, “I cannot actually see out of this makeup.”
The tone is… unclear. It seems like it’s supposed to be tragic, erotic, and horrifying, but lands squarely in “midnight public access theater.” Characters speak in bizarrely stilted dialogue:
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People don’t talk so much as announce.
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Every line feels like it was translated into French, then into German, then back into English by a haunted Google Translate.
You’d think a story about a nipple-eyed woman whose emotional turmoil manifests a serial-killer spider-man would go all in on surrealism. Instead, it just kind of wanders around: Dajette pouts, the spider kills, the police do nothing, and Paris remains one street thick.
By the time the segment ends, you’re left with deep questions, like:
Why eyeball nipples?
Why an albino spider?
Why does everyone sound like they’re reading phonetically off cue cards taped to the camera?
The movie does not answer. The movie does not care.
Segment 2: Change of Face – Stripper, But Make It Confused
Next up: “Change of Face,” which is theoretically about a mysterious stripper who steals other women’s faces and wears them, like a low-budget Leatherface who shops at Sephora.
The Mystery Girl (Rachel Alig) has two modes: dancing on stage and stalking victims while wearing a cape. You’d think face-stealing would involve gore, tension, maybe even meaning. Instead:
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Most face removals happen off-screen or with the finesse of someone cutting wrapping paper with blunt scissors.
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The “mystery” is non-existent; it’s clearly her from minute one.
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The police investigation is handled by Sgt. Anders, who has the energy of a man who has already resigned himself to the fact that he’s in a Glenn Danzig movie and will not be getting out unscathed.
We also get a cameo from Courtney Stodden as “Pretty Blonde,” because nothing says “serious horror” like “vaguely cursed tabloid energy.”
The strip club itself looks like it was assembled out of three poles, six extras, and a fog machine Danzig found on Craigslist. Repetitive dance scenes pad the runtime like the world’s most depressing screensaver. Every time you think the segment is about to ramp up into something—psychosexual horror, identity crisis, anything—it just cuts back to more aimless nudity and a cop muttering, “We’ve got to stop her,” with all the urgency of a man ordering decaf.
It’s like Danzig started with the sentence “She’s a stripper who steals faces” and never got past that one line on the napkin.
Segment 3: Drukija Contessa of Blood – Bath Time for Bad Script
Finally, we arrive at “Drukija Contessa of Blood,” which is basically Tumblr’s understanding of Elizabeth Báthory given physical form. Drukija (Alice Haig) is a cold, pale countess who lures virgins to her castle, murders them, and bathes in their blood to stay young.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
This segment leans hardest into the faux-European Gothic vibe: stone walls, candles, maidens in flimsy dresses, and blood that looks like cherry-flavored corn syrup. Danzig is clearly going for operatic, erotic horror here, but everything moves at the pace of a funeral procession with a sprained ankle.
The killers are monotonous:
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Virgins arrive, looking like they just stepped out of a Spirit Halloween “Peasant Girl” bag.
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Drukija stares with dead-eyed boredom, like she’s mentally checking her emails.
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The girls are killed and Drukija gets in yet another blood bath, lounging like she’s posing for an album cover titled Sadism & Conditioner.
Kayden Kross appears as Morella, and Natalia Borowsky as Sheska, but their characters are so thinly written they might as well be credited as “Additional Blood Providers.” We also get a cameo from Caroline Williams as a peasant woman, which mostly just makes you wish she was in an entirely different, better movie.
There’s no escalation, no twist, no real conflict. It’s just repetition: kill, bathe, stare, repeat. It’s like watching someone’s vampire fetish slideshow on loop.
Dialogue, Direction, and Other Casualties
Across all three segments, certain constants emerge:
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The dialogue is astonishingly bad. Not fun-bad. Not camp-bad. Just, “was this first draft written in one sitting next to an open bottle of red wine?” bad.
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The acting ranges from “community theater audition” to “hostage tape.” A few performers seem confused but game; others look like they were tricked into showing up and decided to just power through it.
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The pacing is glacial. Scenes go on forever, long after you understand what’s happening, as if Danzig simply refused to cut any footage where someone remembered their lines.
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The tone is deadly serious. That’s the wild part: the movie has no idea how hilarious it is. There’s zero self-awareness, which somehow makes it both worse and better.
You get the sense that Danzig approached this like a visionary auteur… while everyone else stumbled around wondering why the spider man has eight arms but only one facial expression.
So… Is It Watchable?
Here’s the thing: Verotika is objectively terrible. On almost every technical and artistic level, it fails. It’s sexist, clumsy, tone-deaf, and frequently boring between the accidental laughs.
But.
If you:
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Love so-bad-it’s-good cinema
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Enjoy communal hate-watching
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Have a high tolerance for cinematic hubris and low-budget nonsense
…then Verotika is kind of amazing in the same way a slow-motion dumpster fire is. You can’t look away, because you truly cannot believe that what you’re seeing got funded, shot, edited, scored, and released without someone, anyone, raising their hand and saying, “Glenn, buddy, maybe the nipple eyeballs need… context?”
It’s like The Room of horror anthologies: a catastrophic passion project powered by ego, zero restraint, and a complete misunderstanding of how movies work.
Final Verdict: Verotic? No. Very Tragic? Yes.
Verotika wants to be erotic and violent and edgy and mythic. Instead, it’s a horny Halloween pageant put on by a very confident goblin with a fog machine.
As horror? It fails.
As art? Absolutely not.
As an unintentional comedy and monument to pure, unfiltered creative delusion?
Ten out of ten broken necks. Would mock again.
