Devour is an independent film, a vampire movie first, but has many other monsters including a crazy werewolf sequence, a galore of practical effects, at least that’s what we were promised. The movie is riddled with ai generated imagery from beginning till the end and it’s very apparent, each ai generated shot sticks out sorely next to the real stuff.
The story is part of their own universe called Bad Candy. It follows an all female metal band named ‘The Virginia Bitches’. They are all vampires and while they are on a tour they get stranded in a town with bigger and meaner monster than them. It’s an interesting setup and the characters are entertaining.
Underneath all the ai there’s a fun horror comedy, that could be a classic spooky season watch. They clearly put lots of work into it, Wayne Anderson built the creatures and they look awesome, the werewolf is tall and lanky inspired by Dog Soldiers, there are loads of blood and gore and plenty of exploding heads. The transformation by Kevin Meaux and Oliver Kasiske is worth noting, it’s very impressive, specially for a project with limited resources, but you get taken out of it and the magic gets ruined, by you guessed it: ai.
It’s honestly an exhausting watch, the constant back and forth switch between practical effects and ai is very jarring. As of right now I only recommend it if you for some reason think that ai is good at filmmaking, because this film will surely convince you how much it actually sucks. Seeing it side by side with great work by actual artist makes it obvious that it can’t match the texture and the tangibility of their work, no matter how “realistic” or cool it might look.
What makes it even more sad is that all of it is just unnecessary. The film is almost 2 hours long, the pacing would have been much better without all the ai stuff and the story would have been just as complete. If they make a cut without it, I would gladly revisit this film and might even recommend it, because the world is interesting and can see the work behind it, but as of right now it’s very disappointing and feel betrayed by all the promises.
