Before I dig into Devour, which arrives in select theaters October 13th and VOD soon after, we need to get the elephant in the room out of the way: this movie contains A LOT of generative AI. And I don’t mean the kind you might blink and miss, either. We’re talking full-on, Sora-generated 10-second Dollar Tree NyQuil hallucinations. What starts with the occasional establishing shot or throwaway bit of digital window dressing gradually balloons into entire sequences of AI-generated imagery stitched together, featuring larger-than-life creatures battling it out across a fictional cityscape where the geography, continuity, and general sense of what the hell is happening don’t always line up. The results are as jarring as you’d expect, and they frequently distract from what is otherwise a competently crafted production. But they also make one thing abundantly clear: the people who would be turned off by this kind of AI overkill probably aren’t the audience Devour is trying to reach in the first place.
Scott B. Hansen’s (Bad Candy) Devour follows a gaggle of goth vampire—sorry, “Fanger”—baddies who moonlight as members of a death metal band called The Virginia Bitches, which appears to be the film’s original working title. When they aren’t sleeping off the daylight hours, they’re out playing venues and hunting for their next meal, accompanied by their loyal roadie and his newly hired human assistant. Things take a turn when the crew stops to pick up a young woman standing in the middle of the road, clearly in distress and missing her tongue. Not long after, they total their tour van while fleeing a group of sirens disguised as cops, leaving them stranded and held hostage in a town populated by a grab bag of supernatural nasties. minotaurs, werewolves, cannibals, warlocks—you name it, Devour has apparently got a guy for that. It’s an ambitious hodgepodge of monsters and mayhem, especially considering the film’s limited resources, and one that suggests there’s no shortage of ideas here. Whether all those ideas can coexist without the help of an AI-generated monster brawl is another question entirely.
I can’t shake the feeling that buried somewhere in Devour’s nearly two-hour runtime is a solid 90-minute indie horror movie trying to claw its way out. There’s plenty to like here, particularly the practical effects and some surprisingly assured camerawork that makes the most of the film’s limited resources. The lighting even dips into some Argento-inspired territory, giving the proceedings a little visual flair that the AI-generated spectacle can’t quite replicate. Unfortunately, the internal logic, lore and rules of this world are a bit of a mess. During a funeral home robbery, the women take off their ski masks saying they can’t be seen on camera, only for the film to later show them quite clearly on camera anyway. Then there’s a wonderfully baffling bit of pop-culture logic when the human roadie-in-training Dylan (J. Gaven Wilde) asks what kind of vampires he’s dealing with and explicitly name-drops Twilight, yet when an actual werewolf turns up, everyone seems to be encountering the concept for the first time.
The performances fare better, for the most part, with the cast led by Gus Langley’s larger-than-life turn as Jerry, the roadie who’s lived over a century and has a razor sharp quip for every occasion. Langley spends much of the film gleefully chewing scenery, bringing a big, larger than life wisecracking energy to the proceedings. The problem is that he devours so much of the screen time that the women barely get a word in edgewise. For a movie built around a band of badass, bloodthirsty vampire women, it’s a shame that the guy sucks up all the oxygen. Personally J. Gaven Wilde, who plays the young roadie thankfully steals the film for me and gives off young Nicholas Hoult vibes, with a performance that feels both natural and engaging.
Now, let’s get back to the AI of it all, because subtlety is very much not Devour’s strong suit. And that’s the problem. When we get to the minotaur showdown or the werewolf rampage, the AI renders are messy, wildly inconsistent, and shoved so far in your face that there’s no ignoring them. Characters shift off-model, the geography gets wonky, and shots that are supposed to flow together look like they were generated by three different models. It’s honestly a damn shame, because there’s a goofy, charming late-night discovery buried in here somewhere, the kind of scrappy vampire flick you stumble across at 2 a.m. But by the time you’ve endured your third Frankenstein’s monster of an action sequence, cobbled together from AI-generated clips, you start wondering why anyone felt the need to make this movie a digital monster truck rally.
By the time we reach the finale, heads are exploding, the werewolf is ripping into faces, and the action has devolved into that special kind of AI-generated nonsense where force, momentum, and basic physics dissolve into an acid-soaked fever dream. At a certain point, the only reasonable response is to stop trying to make sense of what you’re seeing and let the pixels wash over you. Hell, a little chemical assistance might even help—but given what’s already happening on screen, I’m not sure Devour needs any more hallucinations. But to be honest some of the folks watching Devour might honestly not give a shit about AI and just want to see the carnage, I will warn those folks however, while there’s tons of gore and red stuff there’s no nudity.
Sorry, Charlie.
Having given nearly two hours of my life to Devour, I’m choosing to chalk it up to part review, part research. If AI is supposedly coming to take over filmmaking, Devour is proof that the technology still has some growing pains to work through. Sure, some viewers might not notice the inconsistencies or simply write them off as hilariously terrible CGI, but I know what I’m looking at, and I can’t unsee it. There’s a Faustian bargain at play here, and while you can debate the artistic merits of the deal the filmmakers have struck, the devil has clearly held up his end: the film got licensed and distributed, and now here I am writing about it.
Mission accomplished, I guess?
Strangely enough, Devour was the second movie I watched this weekend featuring AI monsters. I followed it up with a screening of MUSK, a documentary that, because Elon apparently couldn’t be bothered to appear on camera, resorts to regurgitating his actual quotes through a grotesque AI avatar. So whether we like it or not, AI isn’t disappearing anytime soon. It’s another tool filmmakers are experimenting with, trying to figure out where it fits and whether it brings anything worthwhile to the table. But after spending two hours watching Devour turn perfectly serviceable rubber monster mayhem into a digital nightmare, in a bad way, I keep coming back to one simple thought: sometimes the scariest thing a filmmaker can do is let your imagination do the heavy lifting and keep the creature out of sight. Horror has spent decades proving that what you don’t see can be far more terrifying than anything you can put on screen. And if embracing the future of filmmaking means forgetting one of the oldest tricks in the horror playbook, I’ll happily take a little less AI and a lot more old-fashioned practical-effects carnage next time.
