Grapes
of
Death
France 1978. Director:
Jean Rollin
Cast: Marie Georges Pascal, Serge Marquand, Brigitte Lahaie
Aka: Les Raisins de la Morte, Pesticide
In
a little French village a strong dose of pesticide has leaked out from
a winery and into the wine, making all wine-drinking humans turn zombie.
So far so good. But this is a Jean Rollin movie. The supposed zombies
are only halfway dead, more in the middle of decaying and they know
it and they can't do anything about it except conform to it. To this
hellish place two girls arrive by train. On the train one of them is
attacked by a contaminated crazy guy and is killed. Meanwhile the other,
Elisabeth (they are always named Elisabeth in a Rollin movie), runs
away from the train and into the village where she encounters one strange
local after another and even a blind girl unaware about what's happening
to her village. Eventually Elisabeth is helped by a mysterious girl
in white (Brigitte Lahaie) and they take refugee in a house. But this
mysterious samarithan also turns out to be a pestiferous homicidal lunatic
and Elisabeth must be resqued again, this time by two guys with guns
who are unaffected by the pesticide because they prefer beer over wine.
Stated to be the first ever gore-movie shot in France Grapes of Death is a movie which benefits from repeated viewings. At first it appears to be just a weird and lowrent Night of the Living Dead rip-off with a premise that is rather hard to take without a smile ("When the wine flows, the terror begins!"). It is all that, but it's more than that also. It's the end of mankind according to a French minimalist. History has it that the film had several producers and financiers running around the set constantly demanding an input. Nontheless Jean Rollin manages to give the film an homogeneous look and feel that is pure Rollin. The pace is slow, the atmosphere is cold, literally, and harsh and you really get the uncomfortable feeling of the most unfriendly and depressive place on earth, or at least in France. The characters are both spooky and sad. They know they're not well, they kill although they don't know why. One guy decapitates the blind girl, whom he have also cruzified on a barn door, while telling her he love her so much. The electronic soundtrack is haunting to say the least. Bizarre and simplistic, almost enerving but painfully effective in creating an apocalyptic atmosphere. The plot runs out of gas and fades towards the end, though, and we are eventually left just as puzzled and shaked as we were found. Grapes of Death is not an equal to, but a different and worthy alternative to the worn-out classics by George Romero and Lucio Fulci.
© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.