THE DEVIL WEARS FACE SKINS

Watching "Verotika" at the Edge of Erection and Embarrassment

I was there—Montalbán Theatre, premiere night. The room smelled like latex, clove vape, and misplaced confidence. Glenn Danzig’s Verotika was about to make its world debut, and what unfolded wasn’t so much a movie premiere as it was a summoning. The film unfurled in front of a crowd that giggled, gasped, groaned — then eventually surrendered. No one was sure whether they were witnessing genius or just something deeply, hilariously cursed.

Spoiler: it’s both. Mostly the latter.

Verotika is a mortifyingly earnest piece of black-lace necro-porn pulp. It plays like the DVD extras from an alternate dimension where Heavy Metal magazine never stopped being the most important thing in your life. It’s not ironic, not self-aware — it’s pure, undiluted id projected in hi-def. Imagine a man with a stack of vintage skin mags, a bootleg VHS of some Canadian fever-dream gorefest shot in someone's basement on a camcorder, and a trial version of something called ‘BloodCut FX 2.1’ downloaded from a forum that hasn’t existed since the Bush administration deciding to “make art,” and you’re halfway there.

Let’s get one thing clear: this isn’t “so-bad-it’s-good.” That’s a lazy take. Verotika is what happens when no one tells the horny metal guy “no.” It’s not a movie, it’s a shrine to Danzig’s unfiltered, undead libido.

Danzig the Auteur (???): When Metalheads Make Movies

For the uninitiated: Glenn Danzig was the dark prince of 80s punk and metal—the satanic crooner of “Mother,” the guy who merged Jim Morrison’s brooding sex appeal with Henry Rollins’ roid-rage and threw in a bootleg Aleister Crowley starter kit for flair. He made Satan sexy for your older cousin. So of course his directorial debut had to be based on his own comic series, and of course it had to be called Verotika—a portmanteau of “violence” and “erotica,” because nuance is for cowards.

Danzig directs like he thinks Mario Bava would’ve, if Bava had been raised on Witchcraft sequels, late-night Cinemax, and questionable taste. The comic book roots show — hard — but in the way your weird friend’s high school sketchbook “showed promise.” There are echoes of Fulci, Franco, Rollin, Argento, even Cronenberg if you squint (and you will squint — because the lighting is godawful). The ambition is there, but so is the absolute refusal to choose a lane. Horror? Porn? Gothic metal music video? Why not all three, badly?

Kayden Kross: Goth Domme, Eyeball Enthusiast, Porn Royalty

Holding this chaos together is Kayden Kross. A veteran adult film star, writer, and director, she’s built a career on high-production erotica with a flair for fantasy — and she brings that same sharp control to Verotika. As Morella — a gothic domme Cryptkeeper in fetish gear and upside-down crosses under her eyes — Kross moves through the film with icy confidence and just the right dose of knowing camp. She knows exactly what kind of trash fire she’s in, and plays it perfectly: committed, unflinching, and fully in control. Smirking and monologuing like someone who’s read worse scripts and made far better porn, she becomes the closest thing this movie has to a compass.

In the opening scene, she stalks toward a woman chained to a wall and breathes out the now-infamous line:

“Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble…”
Only somehow, she makes it sound like a pornographic incantation — half dirty talk, half cursed lullaby.

Then she gouges out the woman’s eyes and licks the juice off her fingers like it’s artisanal honey. Turning to the camera, she purrs:

“Welcome, my Darklings. This is Verotika.”

Cue black screen. Cue butt-rock guitars. Cue realization: this movie is going to try to make you come and scream — but won’t quite succeed at either.

Story 1: The Albino Spider of Dajette

We open in “France,” which in Danzig-logic means looped café music, a plastic Eiffel Tower, and what looks like a Glendale Airbnb staged for an OnlyFans cosplay shoot. There's a wig that wants to be Louise Brooks but lands closer to “Molly Ringwald at Burning Man.” Subtlety has already left the building.

Enter Rachele Richey — porn actress, silicone maximalist — as Dajette. The very first shot is her mid-blowjob, hair bobbing like a metronome, face frozen in the kind of expression usually reserved for anime figurines and dental ads. It’s less sex than orthodontic horror. If Verotika has a casting philosophy, it’s basically: why bother with actors when porn stars come pre-lubed and ready to scream? You can practically hear Danzig flipping through AVN nominations like baseball cards.

Dajette, we’re told, is a French sex worker with literal eyes for nipples. Not metaphorical. Not symbolic. Eyeballs. On. Her. Boobs. They blink. They cry. One tear hits her pet albino spider, which then transforms into a humanoid sex-murderer dressed like a rejected Mortal Kombat skin, voiced with a French accent that feels less “continental” and more “French Stewart with a head injury.” But hey—he’s not alone. Every actor here sounds like they learned their accent from Lumière in Beauty and the Beast, if Lumière also tried to get into kink porn and failed.

The spider stalks women from behind trash cans and strip club furniture, growling things like:
“First, I wish to bend you over and fuck you in the ass.”
To which one woman—who cannot see him, mind you—replies:
“Monsieur has good eyes. Ass-fuck is my specialty.”
The dialogue aims for sleazy intensity but lands more in LiveLeak clip of a failed Ren Faire orgy. It’s played completely straight, which only makes it funnier.

The locations are mostly recycled porn sets — modular rooms you’ve seen in a dozen Brazzers shoots and at least one abandoned sex-horror pilot. The so-called “porn theater” — where Dajette nearly gets gang-banged by a lineup of sweaty extras clearly cast for a “fuck the pornstar” fantasy — is actually just a generic standing movie theater set. It’s somehow the least convincing adult theater ever filmed: too bright, too clean, too empty. The guys loitering around look like they showed up ready to perform, just not ready to be remembered — no one thought to bring ski masks. I’ve edited scenes shot in that exact room. The carpet hasn’t changed. Neither has the smell of ambient regret.

And then there’s the spider’s costume: white, ribbed, and awkwardly tight, like someone peeled it off a display mannequin and glued in a party-store jawline. Between the Power Ranger cosplay and the aggressive butt-talk, it’s Spider-Man rewritten by someone whose only exposure to kink is an Urban Dictionary entry and half a bottle of gas station wine.

Nothing here builds. Nothing escalates. It just... happens. Loudly. Glossily. With a total disregard for tone, tension, or what France might actually look like. It’s not horror. It’s not porn. It’s not parody.

And yet, in brief flashes, the frame starts to flirt with intention. Danzig coats scenes in saturated reds, icy blues, and vape-ad pinks like he’s seen a Giallo once and took notes in crayon. There are even split-diopter shots tossed in — likely a misguided attempt at Brian De Palma flair, though here they just feel like someone bumped the “cinematic” setting on a DSLR.

Richey’s performance, if we’re using that word, peaks somewhere around mascara hysteria. She cries. A lot. The tears flow, the lip quivers, the eyeliner runs like it’s fleeing the scene. It’s clearly meant to be tragic, but plays closer to a Forever 21 fitting room meltdown captured through a fisheye lens. She pouts, trembles, glances offscreen like she’s looking for an exit that never comes. Every sob lands like a held note in a genre karaoke bar two drinks past closing.

Story 2: Change of Face

Of the three segments in Verotika, this one has the clearest beginning, middle, and end — or at least a consistent loop: a stripper murders other women, removes their faces, and wears them on stage as part of her act. That’s not a plot so much as a fetish with structure, but in this film, it practically counts as screenwriting.

At the center of it is Rachel Alig, playing a face-stealing dancer named Mystere. She’s styled like a Robert Smith dominatrix — pale skin, black wig, wet vinyl — like someone tried to rebrand Eyes Without a Face as a SuicideGirls exclusive. And yet Alig somehow stays grounded. Years ago, I cast her in a film that never happened (Sex is Violence — unsubtle, I know), and she walked in with that rare control: camera-aware, unselfconscious, immediately in tune with the material. Watching her here is like seeing a really good actor on the wrong set, surrounded by fog machines, dry ice, and people being paid by the boob.

She spends most of the segment either topless or drenched in blood, but never once loses the thread. She’s alert. Composed. The only person in the frame who seems to think this might be a real movie, or at least a real opportunity. You get the feeling that if she’d been dropped into something like The Hunger, or Lair of the White Worm, or one of those late-’70s Jess Franco films where eroticism curdles into the surreal, she’d have found another gear entirely. Instead, she’s stuck pantomiming menace while the camera fetishizes her like set dressing.

Surrounding her, in nearly every sense, are Aaliyah Hadid and Katrina Jade — porn stars by trade, dancers by function, and here used mostly as ambient erotica. Half the segment is given over to extended strip club sequences: static, arrhythmic, bathed in overhead light that flattens bodies into wax sculptures. The cuts are arbitrary, the movement repetitive. It’s like someone tried to shoot a burlesque show while forgetting why people go to burlesque shows in the first place.

And yet Hadid and Jade rise above it — not as actors, but as screen presences. Hadid, who returns in the next segment, has a gliding, aquatic quality. She moves like she’s underwater, and the camera leans into it. Jade, by contrast, is all edge: punk, confrontational, almost violent in the way she stares down the lens. It’s not acting, exactly, but it’s something close to power. You can see the Sasha Grey influence. In a film that understood how to use their bodies beyond the obvious, both Hadid and Jade could’ve been dangerous.

But Danzig doesn’t build tension so much as space out between ideas. The strip scenes are soundtracked by his own songs — loud, self-serious, arguably better than anything onscreen — while the murder scenes are set to ambient drones that suggest mood but deliver inertia. Lap dances get riffs; the violence gets vacuumed into dead air. There’s no rhythm, just frictionless shifts from one vibe to another.

What’s most baffling is the refusal to commit—to horror, to porn, to anything. The bones are here for something striking: a sex-horror hybrid with real exploitation heft. If Danzig had gone full Eurotrash — color, excess, blood-as-lust — or leaned the other way into hardcore death-metal sleaze, this could’ve landed somewhere in the neighborhood of Nekromantik meets Burlesque. But he stalls out in a purgatory of non-decisions. The horror scenes aren’t scary. The sex isn’t sexy. We’re in the middle lane of a highway to nowhere, all eyeliner and no climax.

Alig deserves better. So do Hadid and Jade, honestly. There’s something almost admirable about how they each try to find a role inside a film that doesn’t know how to give them one. But this isn’t a platform, it’s a sideshow.

And no one here gets out alive. Not in the way they should.

Story 3: Drukija: Contessa of Blood

And here it is — the one that almost works, if you can look past the flat lighting and the fact that “Eastern Europe” is clearly just Griffith Park with some fog machine fumes and a couple of horses doing tight, repetitive loops.

Loosely based on the legend of Elizabeth Báthory — the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman accused of torturing and murdering hundreds of young women to preserve her beauty — Drukija is where Danzig reaches (tentatively, clumsily) for something resembling actual cinema. The ambition is visible, even if the execution remains buried under awkward staging and hammy line reads. For once, there’s an attempt at mood, rhythm, and imagery — erotic horror delivered with a semi-straight face.

Alice Tate plays the titular blood-countess, and she’s genuinely compelling: poised, seductive, locked in. She moves through the frame like she’s in a forgotten Eurotrash vampire film — part Dietrich, part Cruella, part corpse-fucking Disney villain. Her Drukija bathes in blood, slices open her victims, and devours hearts with a ritualistic sensuality that feels almost earned. In a different film — shot with intention, edited with restraint — Tate could’ve delivered a performance worth remembering. Here, she’s the rare actor treating the material like it matters.

Still, there’s a real attempt at mood and visual texture — for once, the erotic horror is delivered with something resembling danger. The visuals finally flirt with intention. They’re more composed, more compelling, even if they often feel like they’re mimicking something without fully understanding it. It’s almost shocking to discover this was shot (at least in part) by the same DP who did Willy’s Wonderland, a movie that actually looks great — stylized, punchy, kinetic. Here, the aesthetic is more uneven. You can feel the seams — likely the result of Danzig-directed reshoots, which have the same chaotic energy as Bob Guccione storming onto the set of Caligula and demanding “more lesbian sex.” In this case: more boobs, more blood, less coherence. There’s a real DP buried in the footage somewhere, but by the time Danzig gets his hands on it, the vibe is less visual storytelling than an unaired episode of Monsters reimagined by a dungeon synth guy who just discovered Meat Loaf album covers and RedTube.

Returning from the previous segment is Aaliyah Hadid, who Danzig reuses here as a virginal sacrifice. Previously, she was just another ass in a strip club lineup. Now she’s laid bare for slaughter, and while she’s still given little to say, her presence is sharper this time, more defiant. When she meets Drukija’s blade, she doesn’t just play dead; she performs something closer to resignation, maybe even commentary. In the film’s most composed shot, Tate cradles Hadid’s bloodied body in a Pietà pose and bites into her heart. It’s grotesque. It’s effective. It’s almost art.

The atmosphere aims for Franco but lands closer to Bordello of Blood with better tits and worse lighting. The production values are abysmal, but the vibe — somehow — is nearly right. And Tate, bless her, fully commits. She struts, she slashes, she fucks the camera with her eyes. You believe she believes in what she’s doing, which is a lot more than you can say for most of the cast sleepwalking through the rest of this thing.

Had this segment been expanded — reshot, rescored, and built entirely around Tate’s camp-regal intensity — it might have been something. Not great, but hypnotic. A sleaze-soaked fairytale with eyeliner, ritual murder, and a pulse. Instead, it’s just another almost-success buried in a film that keeps edging itself but never finishes.

Final Verdict: The Eroticism of Failure

Verotika is a failure. A big, loud, sticky, goth-fantasy failure. But it’s not boring. It’s nakedly sincere in the way only a former rock god with delusions of auteur grandeur could make. It wants to be Black Sunday meets Caligula with a Pornhub login. It ends up as Elvira: Mistress of the C-List But Make It Gross.

Here’s the thing: if Danzig had just committed — gone full hardcore, used his actual music throughout, shot “Drukija” as a standalone with real attention to pacing and performance — this could’ve been something. Not “good,” exactly, but legit. A horror cult hit.

Instead, it’s a compromised clusterfuck that’s too soft for porn, too dumb for horror, and too proud to laugh at itself.

But I’d still watch it again. Stoned. With friends. Maybe in a basement.

Because Verotika, in all its clumsy, naked, metalhead sincerity, reminds us: even the most embarrassing fantasies deserve their time on screen.

Want a tagline?
“Verotika: Come for the tits, stay for the cringe.”