Eat Brains Love (Rodman Flender, 2019)

Stoners in love at the end of the world

Eat Brains Love is a throwback 90s stoner horror-comedy from the director of cult 90s stoner horror-comedy, Idle Hands. That’s still the film for which he’ll continue to be known, but Eat Brains Love is a fun and lighthearted diversion in its own right.

When a sexually-transmitted zombie virus infects burnout Jake and his unobtainable cheerleader crush Amanda, and they eat half their classmates, the two of them are forced to flee town together in search of a rumored cure.

Fortunately, for the would-be lovers, they’re not all-zombie all the time. Most of the time they’re just two normal hormonal teenagers. It’s only when they get hangry that their inner zombies come to the fore, but they can keep their undead cravings in check by snacking on rodents and other small animals.

It's a neat twist on the trope of zombie apocalypse survivors searching for a fabled sanctuary. In this case, our heroes are the infected.

More importantly, the fact that Jake and Amanda remain mostly human throughout allows for a burgeoning romance to develop between them as the movie progresses. I’m not going to suggest it’s one of cinema’s greatest love stories, but it is charming and surprisingly romantic for a stoner horror flick.

Refreshingly, even though Jake and Amanda begin the film in different echelons of their high school's social strata, there is still some sense of shared history between them. They’ve long been aware of each other, so it feels fully genuine when their relationship grows ever-more intimate.

But this isn’t just another rom-zom-com. Eat Brains Love also includes federally-employed telepaths who hunt down the infected and erase the memories of survivors. It is one of these telepathic G-men, fellow teen Cass, who serves as the movie’s narrator — and who also develops a crush on Jake.

Overall, the tone is Zombieland by the way of the Arrowverse. Like I said earlier, it’s lighthearted diversion, but it is an engaging and enjoyable watch. And that’s plenty.

However, there is a reasonable criticism of the film: it doesn’t really have an ending. To put this as spoiler-free as possible, it just sort of ends on a cliffhanger. It’s a very odd choice that smacks like they ran out of money just as they were beginning to shoot the third act.

But to be fair — and as charitable as possible to the film — this does apparently mirror the end of the book on which it’s based (which, of course, is the first in a series). It doesn’t exactly *not* work, but it does leaves you with the feeling that there is much still unresolved. Which is a big disappointment.

That letdown aside, however, Eat Brains Love can absolutely be enjoyed for what it is. This is a movie, after all, that includes a lesbian zombie freedom fighter couple who shelter Jake and Amanda for a while and teach them how to ethically source food using the national sex offender registry — and in one memorable scene toss a victim’s testicles into each other’s mouths like they’re at some cannibalistic hibachi.

So yeah, fun!