Review of "Verotika” by The Headless Critic

Verotika – 2020

Production by: Dark Risen Pictures, UFO Pictures
Distribution by: Cleopatra Entertainment



Welcome to the crypt of Morella (Kayden Kross). Tonight she has three tales of horror to bring you each more perilous than the last.

The Albino Spider of Dajette:
She hides her biggest secret in her bra and like most women she didn’t know the real power that her breasts hold. When Dajette’s (Ashley Wisdom) eyeball nipples cry magical tears that land on The Albino Spider (Scotch Hopkins) she creates a monster who’s only desire is to rape her. She creates a life of nightmares.

Change of Face:
There’s a gruesome killer on the loose leaving a trail the faceless dead behind her that were once beautiful women. Hello again my pretties, did you miss me? Gimme yo face! The Mystery Girl (Rachel Alig) known widely as the Face-Ripper is a pole dancer at Pussy Kats where even the Counter Person (Sean Waltman) is a real degenerate. She also walks the streets at night collecting faces of beautiful women for her wall mural. Police need answers, like now and Sgt. Anders (Sean Kanan) is closing in.

Drukija Contessa of Blood:
Girls saving themselves for marriage is a rite of passage you can only hold onto if the beautiful Contessa Drukija (Alice Tate) doesn't find out about you. Drukija has servants bring her virgins for sacrifice. In order to maintain her own youth Drukija bathes in a pool of virgin blood. If they will not allow a man's head in, she will have their head.

From the demented mind of the Misfit’s Glenn Danzig comes a horror anthology based on his Verotik comics and directed by Danzig himself in his directorial debut. The first short in the anthology is so awful it’s fantastic! A woman with eyeball nipples that cry magical tears then fall onto the worst looking animated spider creates a monster. The animation is something I would lambaste in any other film but the spider produced from the nipple, eyeball tears is worth it. It’s a rapey, albino man-spider conjured from tit tears that terrorizes its creator in her dreams. It’s a French Freddy Krueger. The first short of this anthology is the greatest worst thing I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately from there it only gets worse and not in an enjoyable way.

In the last two stories of the anthology, there’s no rapey man-spider. Need I go on? A collector of heads, a collector of faces and a thing of nightmares is the 2nd short with perhaps the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in any movie ever. What’s the point of this story? For women to give it up when asked or suffer the consequences? A killer cuts off the faces of women who don’t fight back in any way or really seem to care enough that they’re faces are about to be gone.

I held out hope that maybe the third segment would be as ridiculously bad as the first but alas it’s the worst and not for good reasons. Girls slowly bathing in blood just doesn’t do anything for me and it takes up six minutes straight of this short, four straight minutes of which have zero dialogue. Just naked women bathing in blood. If this was a 1990’s Playboy Horror Channel the people who liked watching that kind of stuff might enjoy this.

Nothing in Verotika is done right. All shorts have sexually exploited women that only a man over fifty would cast to show off their bodies as if this is 1990 and not 2020. Shots run on too long, the sound is spotty, sets look like something made for a theater and not a film and Danzig as a director has no idea how to get a good performance out of an actor. This is a movie to watch if you like films full of female actors who are naked or barely clothed, very little story and no knowledge of how to make cinema. Danzig did strike comedy gold for me for all the wrong reasons with the first short story The Albino Spider of Dajette. There’s no need to watch beyond that. Oh and if I haven’t said enough good things about this feature I did like Kayden Kross horns and eye make-up. That is all.

Available Now on VOD & Blu-ray

1 out of 5 Headless Critics