Grapes of Death [Blu-ray]

When preying on humans, the red or the white wine?
Only having seen three of Jean Rollin's films, I will not attempt to give you any insight into this interesting French director. My opinion of this film is the same as the other two I have seen by him: occasionally boring, yet well done with some good bloody moments. Out of the three I've seen, this is a little less exciting than The Living Dead Girl, yet less dull than The Night of the Hunted.

The story is pretty straightforward: a girl is attacked by a zombie on a train, leaves the train, then roams the French countryside looking for people who can help her with the ever-increasing zombie problem. The Grapes of Death title refers to wine made from pesticide-laced grapes, which is responsible for turning people into the zombies. It's different than, say, your typical Romero or Fulci zombiefest in that the people turn into the living dead gradually. It'll be just a hand decaying at first, for example, and the FX showing this and the other gore scenes are pretty effective...

Gory, sleazy zombie flick
Jean Rollin is a name instantly recognizable to hardcore horror fans, yet meaningless to nearly everyone else. This ignorance is quite unfortunate because the French director concocted some of the sleaziest, most unusual films ever made during the 1970s and 1980s, films usually imbued with a disturbing mix of hypereroticism and bloody violence. I have often tossed Rollin's name around in impolite company with seeming aplomb even though I had never seen even one of the man's films. You read enough plot synopses about someone and you start to feel as though you know every intimate detail about their work. What I did hear from others about this director oftentimes did not bode well. He is apparently well versed in schlock filmmaking, which in and of itself is not a problem with me, a true lover of bad cinema, but several of his films continue to draw raves from a selected minority of genre fans. Well, I finally sat down with a Jean Rollin film, his 1979 effort "Fascination," and was...

The Grapes of Death
Jean Rollin achieves what many consider to be his finest work in THE GRAPES OF DEATH, which also serves as one of the first French Gore films. This second dubious honor is a bit misleading, however, as the film is intended to be a surreal fantasy rather than a zombie shocker. A woman returning home to her family's vineyard is horrified to discover that the pesticides being used on the local crops have turned the villagers into the living dead! As is the case in the majority of his pictures, plot and character become secondary to creating a visual canvas (a trait that would carry over into the works of Lucio Fulci). Rollin paints the French landscape in mists, fogs, and dilapidated buildings, which add to the rich atmosphere and eerie setting. His zombies still retain shreds of their humanity, with many of the ghouls begging to be put out of their pain and misery as the rot eats them alive. One of the film's most disturbing sequences finds a blind girl stumbling over the bodies of her...

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