Eat Brains Love
Directed by Rodman Flender. Written by Mike Herro and David Strauss
Sometimes you can just tell when somebody who is far outside of the teenage realm writes and makes a movie trying to be cool and hip with those kids. Yeah here we are with the film equivalent of the Steve Buscemi meme. I do admire the effort to make this flow with hyperactive energy. There is style to spare and that is impressive in a subject matter picked over to death.
Eat Brains Love is about two teenagers, one who has a crush on the other who become zombies and embark on a road trip while being chased by a governmental agency filled with psychics and trigger happy agents as they find an underground community of zombies trying to live their lives. It's your standard issue road trip teen comedy and it also isn't one of those. Naturally the guy is a pot smoking loser who can't bring himself to tell the girl how he feels. Naturally she's the popular cheerleader with the quarterback bully as his boyfriend. All standard issue boilerplate stuff up to this point. Now how you become a zombie in this film is very different than in previous zombie flicks.
You become a zombie through sex. Much like the slow moving, always persistent ghosts of It Follows, it passed through sex. They don't really do much with this other than make a few jokes. The jokes provide some chuckles but mostly groans because it is trying entirely too hard. It is filled with people doing silly things for a joke and it hits those beats you've seen before. It is a fairly short film although not as short as Puppet Master:Doktor Death(59 minutes). It doesn't wear out its welcome but you can also tell it doesn't have much story to tell either.
I will say it has a strange opinion on women. They don't seem to have much beyond falling for the stoner. The psychic chasing them and his cheerleading crush. They exist only as it pertains to the stoner character. This is fine, I suppose but it would have made it a more interesting film to flesh them out. They have to be more than archetypes to feel real and the jokes will land more in that way.
The performances are all good. Patrick Fabian from Better Call Saul knows how to do smarmy like nobody's business. He is always a welcome sight on screen for me. Sarah Yarkin was a pleasant presence. She has some comedic chops and she was better here than in Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
It does revel in the gore. It has plenty of intestine chomping for anybody who enjoys that. The make up effects work but then again they aren't called on to do much. This movie is fine. It serves its purposes. It doesn't do anything that hasn't already been done and you might not be annoyed by the characters.
This is available to watch for free on FreeVee and Tubi. Tubi is a veritable wonderland of a streaming service.
I give this movie a C.
