The Verdict on the AI-Generated Film ‘DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict’ Is In

Everyone talks a big game about how artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize filmmaking as we know it. It’s a world where viewers can instantly become creators, predicts one Substack piece. Well, Hooroo Jackson actually went and did it  with the feature film DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict. Currently a Gumroad exclusive, DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is coming to Blu-Ray and Amazon on August 30^th. The future is here–we can watch vampire romance anime films created entirely by AI. But just because we can, does that mean we should?

The short answer is no. But as I said in my previous two pieces on AI, the moral hazard involved with AI doesn’t interest me as much as what AI films, as they exist right now, actually are. They’re nearly unwatchable. And DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is borderline fascinating in how it manages to take nearly every trope we now associate with AI film, and blow them up so repetitively over a 90-minute runtime that it’s only really possible to see the limitations of using AI for this kind of storytelling, rather than the revolutionary potential.

Dreadclub: Vampire’s Verdict is the story of Betty Gray, a bespectacled young college student at her college’s local Dread Club who falls in love with Duchamps De Ve, a drug dealer who also claims to be an eighties rock star and also a vampire. He is on trial either for killing a woman or for writing a novel that commits intellectual copyright infringement on the De Ve family name, of which he is a member, which is somehow legally distinct from whatever mechanism he uses to publish anything. A lot of the trial is also just about whether or not De Ve actually a vampire, for some reason, including a scene where the prosecutor demands he drink something that could either be blood or just V8. The movie never makes it completely clear.

That plot summary probably makes Dreadclub: Vampire’s Verdict sound a lot more dynamic than it really is. There’s also something in there about the Starseed, and aliens, and a curse, but by the time I got to that part of the story I was already quite exhausted. Dreadclub: Vampire’s Verdict is very literally an exhausting movie because, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the characters never, ever, stop talking. Not even to take a breath. The movie disguises this somewhat by the presence of multiple characters engaged in constant conversation, something else you’ll likely quickly notice because visually, DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is just a series of fast cuts to whichever character happens to be speaking at the moment.

DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is only really an animated film in the very technical sense that it consists of moving drawings. There’s no action, and in any given cut, the most movement we get tends to be the lip sync. More noticeable than any movement is the fact that the animation style tends to change radically in between cuts. Betty Gray’s bespectacled visage is mostly recognizable all the time. Ironically, the AI character Jamboree is the one with the most dramatic appearance shift, at times being a computer and other times a cell phone and other times just a weird mix of two old-timey robot objects smashed together.

DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is also notable for largely being in black-and-white. This isn’t a technical limitation. Some scenes, namely the dream sequence, are in full color. But the AI generated colors are so garish they’d probably provoke a sensory overload if the movie used them too much. The dream sequence also sticks out as being the only scene in the movie where the fast cuts and conversation jumps actually appear to be somewhat natural, mostly because DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict can get away with a lot more nonsense in a context where nothing is really supposed to be coherent anyway.

DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict does manage to be funny sometimes with its general incoherence–someone bribes Jamboree at one point into breaking the law by promising it a trip to the aquarium. The script somewhat impressively also manages to riff on its own stupidity on occasion. Duchamps De Ve is quite mean to Betty Gray, calling attention to her genuinely terrible judgment.

But I don’t think that the AI which produced DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict is particularly self-aware or anything like that. Such self-awareness is a common trope in fanfiction, as even the most immature writers often realize that their self-insert characters lack redeeming qualities enough to make anyone as cool as a vampire fall in love with them. If I had to guess, the AI that produced DreadClub: Vampire’s verdict probably relied on reading Twilight fan fiction to “learn” how to write a vampire romance, since Twilight fan fiction writers are the ones least likely to sue.

That’s about as close as I can get to writing anything positive about DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict. Every so often it manages to get just barely absurd enough to be kind of funny. But don’t expect that this means you’ll be able to riff on this movie with friends or anything like that. There aren’t any pauses in between all of the talking, and just like a real movie, DreadClub: Vampire’s Verdict can deceive you into thinking that there might be some one off background detail that will somehow render the whole project coherent. At one point Betty Gray is threatened with expulsion for bad grades, and has to go teach summer school. There’s a pay-off for this. Sort of. Although I’d rather have seen our heroes take Jamboree to the aquarium.