Glenn Danzig’s infatuation with B-grade horror movies defined his early work with the punk group Misfits, and now he’s making his own bloody splatsploitation flicks. His latest, Death Rider in the House of Vampires, sets a nosferatu story in the Old West, where a befanged Danny Trejo tussles with a dark figure in a black Stetson.
In the three-minute trailer, the cowboy Death Rider (Final Destination actor Devon Sawa) seeks sanctuary at what turns out to be a bordello of blood. Naturally, things turn from sanguine to sanguinary as the establishment’s other guests sink their teeth into the, naturally, scantly clad women (this is a Glenn Danzig movie after all). “Ever see what happens when you pour liquid silver down a bloodsucker’s throat,” Death Rider asks, while smelting the precious metal. “Well, you just watch.” And watching is about all you can do, since the point of the movie is to show as much gore as possible.
About halfway through the trailer, director Danzig himself makes an appearance in his own cowboy hat. “Wanna drink, kid?” he says at one point, blood dripping down his chin as he holds the limp body of a bleeding woman. He plays a character named Bad Bathory. Danzig also wrote the film’s script and its score.
Other actors of note in the film include Hostel filmmaker Eli Roth, who plays Drag Cassidy; Naked Lunch actor Julian Sands, as Count Holiday; and actress Ashley Wisdom, who appeared in Danzig’s last film, 2019’s Verotika.
Although Verotika, an anthology film, got mostly negative reviews from critics (the website Bloody Disgusting called in the “horror equivalent of The Room“), movie watchers embraced the cult film. “We freaked a lot of people out, which is good,” Danzig said of Verotika in a Rolling Stone interview last year. “Everywhere we took it — we did showings all over the country and even into Barcelona, Spain — people seem to love it. So it’s great.”
From Rolling Stone US
