Devour

“I’ve seen a thousand years of mankind’s bullshit,” says narrator Jerry (Gus Langley) over a very shouty and explody US Civil War montage at the start of this film. Maybe it’s true. But a thousand years of bullshit would not be enough to prepare one for this film.

If it doesn’t grab you during the Civil War sequence then it will shortly afterwards, when Jerry takes a tumble down a waterfall like a poorly rendered computer game character, arms flailing as we watch in point-of-view mode before snapping through four abrupt changes of camera position with nothing cohesive to knit them together: this was made by ‘artificial intelligence’, and there’s a reason why kids use that phrase as an insult, pointing at each other in the playground and convulsing in laughter. Unfortunately you’re unlikely to laugh as long on this occasion, because despite some gifts from the script (‘vampire’ has become a bad word, so “In modern times we say ‘fangers’”), overall it’s just dull.

It really shouldn’t be. This has the sort of plot which, in conjunction with half-decent physical effects that worked in motion and a proper sense of people having fun on set, would be a delight to watch, no matter how bad it was. Set in New Salem and the largely abandoned Crimson City, on Halloween, it follows the immortal Jerry, now a roadie, and the all-female black metal band he claims to have started, Virginia bitches, whose members prove how wild they are by saying ‘bitch’ a lot, snacking on fans in the toilets and, um, driving away from a petrol station without paying. It’s all happening here. With a nodding dracula on the dashboard and new pet human Dylan (J Gaven Wilde) there to reassure them that they can still impress somebody, they’re off on a tour that will be cut short after just two gigs when they run into a battered, tongueless pregnant woman and a whole lot of trouble.

“Vampires aren’t the only things that live forever,” cautions Jerry, sounding like an AI himself with his droning, nuance-free heavy metal voice. He seems to be right, though. This is one of those films whose creators try to make up for everything else by throwing as many monsters as they can at the screen, and again, if those monsters looked halfway believable, it would probably work. The zombies are pretty dull and basically only there as cannon fodder, but there are also sirens (sexually dimorphic and non-aquatic but capable of delivering nasty sonic blasts), a minotaur, a warlock, a werewolf, and lots of redneck human cultists. One of the vampire women in the band has a secret which gives her special powers and gives the film an excuse to add an extra cheesy twist at the end.

There’s a lot of running about in cornfields and some really bad fire and explosion effects, plus an oversized glowing green McGuffin which is basically a rubbing version of the One Ring. Tragically, the film puts everything into setting up a final action sequence which features the worst slop of all. An investment has been made in music and one can see how it was storyboarded to convey energy, but delivered in this soulless way, it comes across like one of those annoying video game cut scenes you’ve seen a hundred times but are not allowed to skip through. The editing is atrocious and it goes on far too long, the main interest lying in trying to work out just what it is that the AI has digested to lead to it spewing stuff out as it does.

If this sounds like nitpicking, let me be more specific. Nothing moves as if it were alive, or even undead. Heads are smashed in and faces ripped off, but people just keep standing there. Blood in conversational scenes looks real enough but spurts of blood look like red water. In a scene where a van runs over large groups of people, most of them simply vanish as they go under the wheels, leaving almost nothing on the surface of the road. The cumulative effect of all this is that what should be thrilling simply fails to engage. If they can’t be bothered to make it, why should we be bothered to watch it? Take my advice, and don’t.

Reviewed on: 07 Oct 2026