As of August 2024, this 22-minute jaw-dropper can be termed the AI movie to end all AI movies. Its creator was the underground film legend Damon Packard, who’s best known for the experimental DV epic REFLECTONS OF EVIL (2002). In more recent years Packard has turned to AI, resulting in shorts like THE MARAUDERS OF MYSTIC ISLE and AXEL FOLEY GOES TO SEE AXEL F. TERROR ABOVE THE SUNSET STRIP (2024), made with “Creative Contributions” by Erik Zaldivar, is Packard’s long-in-the-works AI magnum opus, and it doesn’t disappoint.
The film commences with an extended late afternoon montage of Sunset Boulevard (or at least an AI interpretation of it) circa 1970, set to the (unauthorized?) sounds of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and The Sandpipers’ “Come Saturday Morning.” We see weird space-agey cars, unicycle riders, bald Charles Manson worshipping cultists, reconfigured Hollywood landmarks (such as the “Toweer Reecords” building), impossibly massive billboards advertising BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE “AAPES,” TROG, HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS and JOE (recreated clips from which, featuring computerized renderings of its star Peter Boyle, are seen playing on storefront monitors), and an imposing statue of a crucified hippie gal.
At around the nine minute mark the “plot” kicks in. Inspired by the 1970 NIGHT GALLERY episode “The House,” said plot consists of a dream related by a young woman who’s seen relaxing on the hood of her 1968 Plymouth Barracuda, parked in front of a run-down Hollywood Hills mansion. The woman, whose guise is ever-changing, observes that “My hand has melted into the hood of my Barracuda” (she’s not kidding), but “it doesn’t bother me.”
Much of the remainder of the film takes place inside the mansion, a gothic funhouse not too dissimilar to the setting of the aforementioned HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS. The heroine’s musician sister Carly is afoot, along with assorted ghosts, zombies, upward moving slinkies, humanoid apes (as seen in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES and TROG) and a band of Black Panthers who are “in town to pick up some white women.”
“So basically, you won’t leave until you rape me, then beat me to death?” the heroine asks the Panther’s leader, who replies, “Well you know, you ain’t got to put it that way, but…yeah, why not?” (The audio was sampled from the seventies-sploiters THE MACK, J.D.’s REVENGE and SCREAM PRETTY PEGGY.) But then a WWII era grenade is detonated, blowing the mansion sky high and somehow causing the entire Sunset Strip to burst into flames.
Damon Packard’s collaboration with AI has proven surprisingly harmonious, as the format is complimentary to his bizarre, movie-mad worldview. The budgetary and pacing issues that afflicted Packard’s live action films have been ironed out, with AI allowed to impart what, at this early stage in its development, it imparts best: the form and texture of a dream, which has rarely been more exactingly rendered.
Multiple image and speech generating AI programs were utilized in the creation of TERROR ABOVE THE SUNSET STRIP, which explains why portions of it look uncannily lifelike and others rather cartoony (and downright glitchy in parts). What holds it together is the visionary filmmaking, which in surrendering to rather than fighting against the quirks of AI creates a cinematic language entirely its own.
Vital Statistics
TERROR ABOVE THE SUNSET STRIP
Director/Producer/Screenplay/Cinematography/Editing: Damon Packard (and AI)