Seeing there was a new zombie film up on Shudder I had to check it out. Brain Freeze is a French language Canadian comedy horror that was directed by Julien Knafo, who also wrote the story and composed the music. Unfortunately, this never seemed to find its groove and spent its run time idling about without really doing anything that exciting.
An experimental fertilizer is used on the golf course of a rich gated community on Peacock Island in French-Canada, with the aim of keeping the grass rich and vibrant even throughout winter. The fertilizer has a bad side effect however, namely that anyone who ingests the liquid becomes a green blooded zombie/plant hybrid. With the stuff getting into the islands water supply, it isn't long before nearly everyone on the island is infected. Seemingly the only survivors are teenage André (Iani Bédard), his baby sister, and security guard Dan (Roy Dupuis). With access off the island prohibited by a nervous government, they decide that it is down to them to try and find the cause of the outbreak and find a way to stop it.
I spent most my time with Brain Freeze waiting for it to reach its potential. Instead it is near enough ninety minutes of not much at all occurring. This is billed as a comedy horror but the comedy is only very slight, there were a few amusing gags, but just a few. It felt like the comedy was more about how the characters react to their situation, or how they don't act. Early on for instance, André's mother ends up being killed while chasing him, to which the boy shows zero sadness about. Dan on the other hand appeared to be on a quest to reach his daughter, who is shown in hiding at the golf course where she worked. I figured she would become one of the protagonists, yet the bizarre decision was made to not only have her get infected and turn in a scene that doesn't appear on screen, but Dan also rescued her and subdued her also off screen. It then turns into a meandering journey for the three survivors as they go to random locations in search of the cause, with the baby inevitably wandering off to get into trouble every other scene. With a late dip into The Crazies territory things do get slightly dark, but it made me wish that either they had committed to this being more funny than this was, or making this into more of a horror than it was.
At least the look of the zombies is kind of original. These are of the running variety, but are different in that their blood is green, and the more advanced ones are sprouting growths of grass on their bodies. They are also attracted to both water and sunlight, both of which has a calming effect on them, that had them only moving around when bothered, reminding me of the zombies from The Girl With All the Gifts. It was cool to see animals were also infected, one of the few comedic elements that worked was this small yappy zombie dog that got booted across a room in one amusing scene. There were plenty of scenes where characters were running from the zombies, but not really any where they were battling them. Probably a good thing as the limbs were very brittle, breaking off the ghouls with minimal effort. Zombie makeup was fine, green eyes, and green spittle, but nothing too memorable. Sometimes some dodgy looking CG effects were used, a bad looking explosion early on, a few helicopters and a rough looking CG zombified fish.
Brain Freeze always felt it was about to get good, but it never did. With a random group of characters who did little to shine and seemed aimless, and with comedy that was only ever slight, I was mostly bored with what I was seeing. Brain Freeze is currently streaming on Shudder.
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