Glen Danzig is mostly known for his music with punk/goth/horror bands The Misfits and Danzig, but now he's directing movies and premiered his first feature Verotika (based on his own series of comics) at the Music Box, Chicago in 2019. Reports on that screening likened the experience to something as rare and disastrous as the original screening of Tommy Wiseau's The Room. For those who have puzzled (as I have) over the very particular ineptitude and allure of Wiseau's famously expensive ego project The Room--now having nearly spawned a rebirth of the midnight movie phenomenon, a pretty great "making of" book by co-star Greg Sesteros, The Disaster Artist, and a pretty ok movie of that book by James Franco--you know that the bar for creating something akin to that now-famous screening (likely the stuff of myth at this point) is a high bar. I wasn't there, so I can't say, and I have yet to see Verotika, so I can't speak to that film either, but I have seen the new Danzig opus Death Rider in the House of Vampires... and I have a lot more questions than I do answers.
How does a movie like Death Rider in the House of Vampires get distribution to a mainstream cinema on a Tuesday night in Missouri? Does the celebrity of Glen Danzig and the popularity of "Misfits culture" have a far greater reach than I'm aware of? I mean, I'm aware that Misfits T-shirts are fairly common attire for a certain sect of punk kid that's simply cooler than I am, but does the whole phenomenon have the momentum to result in this movie being screened in a corporate multiplex, nestled between the Aretha Franklin story and the Jungle Cruise movie?? I guess the answer is: YES. And, YES, I'm kind of thrilled by that. While I'm definitely not one of those "Misfits" guys, I think my inner child is, and that a movie this laughably awful had enough financial backing to be somehow lobbed into the public view makes that little beast very happy.
Still, every bad movie is bad in it's own particular way, and I've spent what most would consider way too much time chronicling bad movies on this very site. I began by trying to answer the question "Terrible, or Just Terrible?" around ten years ago, but recently the tradition of bad movie watching has nearly replaced all traces of Christmas in our house with a celebration we call "Jason and Jen's 12 Terrible Movie of X-Mas" (see our inaugural list here -- also of note, our pandemic-inspired Terrible Movie Marathon: Quarantine 19 Edition). In short, Death Rider in the House of Vampires is not the worst thing I've ever seen...but, it is some nearly unbearable garbage. I would describe the plot, but the title is the plot: there's a character named the Death Rider (Devon Sawa), and he spends some time in the House of Vampires. To put in any more effort into narrative description just wouldn't be in the spirit of this project.
In the opening sequence we see the Death Rider riding across the desert toward the House of Vampires, leading a second horse ridden by what seems to be an abducted porn actor (Tasha Reign, porn actor) wearing merely a teal-colored wrap around her waist (a color choice that immediately clashed with the established "spaghetti western" palette). The sequence of the Death Rider and the topless girl riding through the desert, set to an original Danzig-penned and performed theme song, dares to destroy your patience before the "story" has even begun. They ride, and they ride some more. Then, there's more riding. Toward the House of Vampires. When the two characters finally encounter the vampire Bela Latigo (Danny Trejo), the inability of director Danzig to create even the simplest cinematic illusion--in this case, that the actors are audibly speaking to each other in the same space--is striking, to say the least. Thus begins the overarching motif of the film: baffling technical incompetence.
Again, the initial shock of this experience was dealing with the reality that I was watching it in an actual mainstream cinema...that, sure, plays a lot of crap, but most of that crap seems, at the very least, technically completed. One of the most gobsmacking developments in the film is that after boasting "original music" by Danzig himself in the opening credits, much of the film seems negligently underscored. The opening song is a fairly predictable rendition of what you might expect Ennio Morricone to sound like filtered through Glen Danzig, and while you might expect that to be a warm-up to a soundtrack filled with ripping goth-rock numbers...nope. In fact, Death Rider in the House of Vampires (I refuse to abbreviate at this point!) features multiple scenes that seemingly have incomplete sound elements, as with the "vampire saloon" that has zero ambient noise and barely the sound of player piano, leaving the actors to sort of wriggle and improvise "general vampire saloon activity" in the most uncomfortable way--like those odd "making-of " outtakes where you see a club scene minus the musical soundtrack, and you realize the sheer awkwardness of actors having to create a party vibe in a soundless space--this is the general vibe of large stretches of DRITHOV (ok, I caved).
More questions arise: why is Julian Sands in this movie? And why does every scene with Julian Sands end with a lingering, drunken push-in that waits for him to do or say something else? Rarely in cinema does a filmmaker manage to recreate the awkwardness of a missed cue or forgotten line that can only be achieved in live theatre, but Danzig has managed it! Also featured are Kim Director (recently pretty great in The Deuce, and probably the actor who comes out of this the most unscathed), Eli Roth (who gets the "Most Enthusiastic" award), and Danzig himself as a baddie named Bad Bathory. Notable cameos include Fear frontman Lee Ving and Fred Armisen. This one is a true endurance test. You could call it sexist and juvenile and unnecessary, because it's certainly all of those things, and while it's truly a slog that likely requires a few like-minded, possibly sadistic, companions in order to endure it's run time, the actual shock of this film is that it was released at all--well, to steal a famous line: it feels less like it was released and more like it escaped.
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