I just saw a werewolf eat a model.
I’m not okay.
This past Saturday night, I ended my triple feature movie binge with Charles Band’s Models Vs. Werewolves. I wanted to like this quick and gory Tubi trash. But it soon started tripping over it’s own AI slop.
The wolves look kinda cool, I guess? But I was bewildered by their own seeming transformation from practical effects to AI, with nothing consistent between shots.
I looked it up, and sure enough, I was right. This is a mix of both practical and traditional makeup and bodysuits that have been altered or altogether replaced by generative AI from shot to shot. With lots of CGI blood. This didn’t make sense to me, as audience are hungry for practical monster suits. Who cares how junky they look? Horror fans are much more susceptible to that, with most being just outright outraged by any use of AI in their genre fare.
Charles Band is going to Charles Band it up, and as he gleefully points out in his own movie by showing his characters watching Trancers, he’s been doing this for over forty years, so he’s fearlessly utilizing AI without a care in the world who calls foul. Fair enough.
For those who don’t know the name, Band has been a fixture of independent genre filmmaking since the 1970s. He founded Empire Pictures in the early 1980s, helping bring cult favorites like Ghoulies, Trancers, and Re-Animator to audiences before launching Full Moon Entertainment in 1988. Full Moon became a home for low-budget horror and science fiction, building its reputation on franchises like Puppet Master, Demonic Toys, and Subspecies. Band has spent decades finding ways to get genre movies made on limited budgets, so his willingness to embrace AI feels like another chapter in a long career of doing things his own way.
So far, there isn’t an outcry or ban on Full Moon for so blatantly jumping on the AI bandwagon. A lot of the more vocal detractors are just virtue signaling anyway. They cried at Eli Roth, but I’m not sure how many of those critics just used AI as an excuse to both deride the divisive director, or actually show themselves to be on the right side of history.
Maybe the weirdest thing about Models Vs. Werewolves is that it was first cut into, and released as a vertical series before it was repurposed as a “feature length” movie. I use “feature length” sarcastically, as this thing is only 74 minutes long.
There is a lot of Terrifier-style gore, with faces being chomped off, and guts being strewn, but the AI portions never quite move right. Action becomes inverted and bent back like a Ken doll’s knees.
There’s not much to get worked up over here, good or bad. The synopsis is the whole movie. A group of models go to an Airbnb run by Dee Wallace and are attacked by towering werewolves.
These wolf creatures don’t have any kind of backstory. They’re the type of permanently cursed lycanthropes that never transform back into a human, aside from the fire crotch model who gets attacked in her bedroom after giving some swarthy jock a private dance.
The models don’t really fight the wolves, so the Vs. in the title is a little misleading. The movie should have been called Werewolves Eat Models. That is much more accurate. That’s all this is for an hour. Pretty models getting devoured by hunger wolves. Read whatever meta text you want into that. I don’t think it’s any more subversive than, “Here’s some gore.” I don’t think it’s a commentary on anything.
It’s easy enough to stare at for an hour. Your mileage with blatant AI may vary. I wasn’t so offended that I turned it off, and I’m not going to go picket this thing in the streets. I’ve never been any kind of Full Moon fan, and probably wouldn’t have hit play if I knew the studio was behind this beforehand.
Knowing this was a Vertical before it was expanded into a feature film makes sense, as this is straight up TikTok slop for quick thumb doom scrolling. Most people will probably just watch one of the gruesome attacks and scroll on.
Models vs. Werewolves is just another one of those enticing titles with an eye-catching poster. Now that AI is in the mix, the contents inside the movie can actually look like the bait-and-switch box art.
But is that a good thing? I kind of like the old school treat-to-trick of seeing an amazing DVD cover and discovering nothing but a bunch of moldy rubber suits. But I’m the kind of guy who’ll watch movies projected off an old inner tube. Maybe I’m not the best judge.
