Rating: 2/5 Stars — And That’s Being Generous
There’s a particular kind of bad movie that almost demands a little respect. The kind that throws everything at the wall, embraces its own ridiculousness, and somehow manages to entertain you through sheer audacity. Then there’s Devour, a movie that throws everything at the wall, congratulates itself for doing so, and somehow makes 113 minutes of vampires, werewolves, monsters, and bloodshed feel like an absolute eternity.
And I’m being generous with those two stars.
Directed by Scott B. Hansen, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Desirée Hansen, Devour is a movie so hopelessly enamored with its own ideas that it apparently never occurred to anyone to ask whether those ideas were actually any good. A husband-and-wife writing team. How cute. Puke.
The first thirty minutes are almost entirely dedicated to convincing us how cool, witty, and clever this movie is. The problem? It isn’t any of those things.
Nearly every exchange feels engineered to deliver another supposedly brilliant one-liner. Characters don’t so much converse as wait for their opportunity to say something that the screenplay desperately wants us to find hilarious. And the quips? They’re not funny. Worse, they arrive at precisely the wrong moments, constantly deflating whatever tension or atmosphere the movie might have accidentally stumbled into.
Centuries-Old Vampires, Teenage Dialogue
And can we talk about these vampires for a minute?
We’re supposed to believe that some of these creatures have been walking the Earth for hundreds of years, yet they all communicate like teenagers who were turned last Tuesday. There’s no weight to their dialogue, no sense of history, no indication that these are ancient predators who’ve spent centuries learning how to exist among humanity. They just trade juvenile wisecracks like a bunch of kids trying to impress each other at a party.
You’d think after a few hundred years they’d have figured out how to convincingly cloak themselves as the monsters they supposedly are. Instead, they’re about as intimidating as a group of teenagers arguing over who gets the last slice of pizza.
It’s the kind of writing that feels like it came from a thirteen-year-old enthusiastically asking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” over and over again. And sure, maybe it would be cool. If the movie had any idea what to do with those ideas beyond simply throwing them onto the screen.
We’ve got vampires! We’ve got a bounty hunter! We’ve got Van Helsing! We’ve got monsters and blood and all manner of supernatural nonsense!
Fuck. We’ve seen it all before.
And that’s perhaps Devour’s greatest offense. For a movie with so much happening, it’s astonishingly, exhaustingly boring.
A Horror Movie Without Anyone Worth Following
One of the more baffling decisions here is that Devour can’t seem to decide who its lead character actually is.
There’s no real anchor. Nobody whose journey gives us a reason to invest in the increasingly ridiculous events unfolding on screen. Characters come and go, things happen, people explain those things, and eventually you realize you’ve spent an awful lot of time watching a movie without caring about a single person in it.
And just when you think you might have figured out whose story this actually is, a character suddenly becomes the linchpin behind an enormous amount of the movie’s mythology and unfolding events. It’s the kind of development that should fundamentally change how we understand everything that’s come before it. Instead, it feels like the screenplay has abruptly decided that someone needs to be important and hopes we’ll just go along with it.
There’s little meaningful groundwork, no satisfying sense of discovery, and certainly no emotional investment to make that sudden importance resonate. The film simply announces another supposedly significant development and expects us to be impressed.
Jerry the roadie, played by Gus Langley, initially seems like he might provide that missing ingredient. For about five minutes, he’s genuinely entertaining. There’s something there that suggests we might finally have a character worth spending some time with.
Unfortunately, that goodwill evaporates pretty quickly.
Langley’s gravelly delivery and limited emotional range become increasingly grating, particularly when the movie asks Jerry to carry more of the narrative weight. What initially feels like an amusing character choice quickly becomes another obstacle between the audience and anything resembling an emotional connection.
KateLynn E. Newberry’s Morgan is another piece of an ensemble that never quite comes together as a compelling narrative. It’s not necessarily that the actors have nothing to offer. It’s that the screenplay doesn’t seem particularly interested in giving anyone a convincing journey.
Horror certainly doesn’t require likable protagonists. But somebody needs to be interesting. Somebody needs to give us a reason to care.
Devour struggles mightily with that fairly basic requirement.
Devour’s Practical Effects Deserve Better Than Its AI Imagery
Now, here’s where things get particularly frustrating, because there are moments when Devour actually looks pretty damn good.
Some of the practical creature effects are genuinely impressive. There’s a Minotaur and a werewolf that look fantastic, and a handful of gross-out moments that demonstrate what this movie might have accomplished with a little more discipline and a lot less self-indulgence.
But then the AI-generated imagery arrives.
And boy, does it arrive.
Let me preface this by saying that I’m actually a proponent of AI in filmmaking. I look at it much the same way people once looked at computer-generated effects. It’s a tool. It can augment practical filmmaking, expand creative possibilities, and allow independent productions to accomplish things that might otherwise be financially impossible.
But like any tool, it requires restraint. It requires judgment. And perhaps most importantly, it requires somebody in the editing room who knows when enough is enough.
Devour seems to have missed that last part entirely.
The sequences that appear AI-generated are frequently glaringly obvious, and rather than complementing the practical work, they actively undermine it. Some clips appear multiple times, creating the impression that the filmmakers were more interested in squeezing every possible second out of the imagery than considering whether it actually belonged in the finished movie.
It’s especially frustrating when a convincing practical creature effect is followed by something so blatantly artificial that whatever immersion the film had managed to create immediately evaporates.
The problem isn’t that AI was used. The problem is that nobody seems to have known when to stop using it.
113 Minutes of Exposition and Very Little Payoff
At nearly two hours, Devour is a movie that desperately needs someone willing to take a pair of scissors to it.
And here’s where things get particularly interesting. Hansen didn’t just direct and co-write this thing with his wife. He also edited it.
Which means the same guy who helped write this bloated, meandering screenplay was also the person responsible for deciding what stayed in the finished movie.
And apparently, just about everything stayed in.
There’s something to be said for having complete creative control. There’s also something to be said for having somebody in the room willing to tell you that your movie isn’t nearly as clever as you think it is. Devour desperately needed that person. Instead, it feels like a film where nobody was willing to kill their darlings, even when those darlings were slowly killing the movie.
For all its supernatural chaos, the film spends an extraordinary amount of time explaining itself. Characters continually stop to tell us what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what everything supposedly means. And when the big reveals finally arrive, they’re rarely surprising enough to justify the endless buildup.
It’s a strange contradiction. Here’s a movie positively overflowing with ideas, yet so little of it feels imaginative.
The vampires are familiar. The monster mythology is familiar. The character archetypes are familiar. Even the attempts at subverting expectations feel like things we’ve watched dozens of times before.
And because the screenplay is so determined to be clever, it never seems to realize just how predictable it’s become.
What we’re left with is a collection of tired concepts wrapped in a tremendous amount of blood, held together by exposition and interrupted by jokes that weren’t particularly funny in the first place.
Final Verdict: Devour (2026) Review
There’s a version of Devour that might have worked. A leaner, meaner, more focused movie that embraced its practical effects, established a compelling protagonist, and trusted its audience enough to stop explaining every damn thing.
Instead, we get a bloated supernatural horror comedy that mistakes constant activity for entertainment and endless wisecracks for personality.
The practical creature work deserves credit. Some of the gore is genuinely fun. And buried somewhere beneath all that noise is the occasional glimpse of a movie with real potential.
But potential doesn’t make a movie entertaining.
At the end of the day, Devour feels like a film made by people so enamored with how cool their ideas sounded that they forgot to ask whether those ideas actually worked together.
It’s loud. It’s bloody. It’s relentlessly impressed with itself.
And somehow, against all odds, it’s boring as hell.
2 out of 5 stars. And frankly, that’s generous.
Watch the Devour (2026) Official Trailer
Watch the official Devour trailer on Vimeo.
Devour was released in select theaters October 9, 2026, and on digital October 13, 2026, through Epic Pictures / DREAD.
