Despite what some chatbot or Murdoch-owned newspaper told you, Hell Grind, the 95-minute farting-demon movie generated by AI, did not premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Per Futurism, Hell Grind was “not screened as part of the official Festival de Cannes program,” according to a festival spokesperson. Though outlets like Screen Daily and the Journal say otherwise, the film screened at “an industry event organized by third parties in Cannes,” the city, not the festival.
“Four street thieves are on the road to hell, literally, in an action-adventure movie debuting at the Cannes Film Festival Thursday,” read the lede paragraph to a WSJ article about the film on Wednesday. “But what’s compelling about Hell Grind isn’t the campy plot: It’s that every character, setting and prop in the 95-minute movie was generated by AI.”
The film was made using Higgfield AI, and its producers are more than happy to confuse potential audiences and investors by announcing its Cannes debut without mentioning that it’s not part of the festival. “We just premiered in Cannes our first 95-minute feature film made entirely on Higgsfield,” writes Higgsfield founder Alex Mashrabov on LinkedIn. “A team of 15 professional directors, DPs, and editors made it on Higgsfield in 14 days for under $500K. The traditional comparable production cost is around $50M. But beyond the numbers, this is the first AI film to demonstrate that AI can now sustain character consistency, world coherence, and narrative arc across a complete feature.”
One glimpse at the trailer demonstrates that Hell Grind looks like a hell grind. Nevertheless, the Journal attempts to make the “creative” process of making one of these turds appear compelling and practical: “The core of the movie-making process here was prompting the AI models and getting clips back, Alimzhanov said. Each prompt would generate about 15 seconds of footage. Those 15 seconds needed to be generated a number of times, with tweaks to the prompt to get the best possible version. The first 25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations, which ended up as 253 final shots.” Those individual prompts were, “on average, 3,000 words each.” But perhaps the production’s greatest failure was using “natural light” to avoid the overlit AI sheen that many refer to as slop. Hell Grind proudly proves that underlit scenes can also be slop.
Appearing at Cannes earlier this week to promote his animated film Tangles, Seth Rogen spoke to the worry of AI in Hollywood. What he had to say really spoke to the nuance of a moment of uncertainty in the arts, which backs up what Hell Grind accomplishes. Rogen says, “Every time I see a video on Instagram that’s like, ‘Hollywood is cooked,’ what follows is the most stupid dog shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” Surprisingly, he made this assessment without even seeing Hell Grind.
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