When choosing something to watch, there’s often a scene early on that clinches for me whether I’ve made the right choice or not. For The Grapes Of Death (1978), directed by French exploitation filmmaker Jean Rollin, when the protagonist Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is running for her life through the French countryside, completely alone within the greenery, scored to the eerie, melancholic synth by Phillippe Bissmann, I knew this film was for me. Many horror movies work on the trope of a scared woman running away, and in this example, it’s all about the atmosphere and tone.
Rollin’s movies are slow and dream-like, helped by their low budgets, locations and splashes of violence and nudity. Most of Rollin’s filmography involves vampires, and The Grapes of Death is an outlier in focusing on zombies, or something like zombies (comparable to George A. Romero’s The Crazies). An experimental pesticide used on a vineyard (hey, this is French zombie movie after all) has an unfortunate side-effect: people are turning into mad killers, with a side order of leaking sores. Travelling to meet her boyfriend, the owner of a winery, Elizabeth is attacked and spends the movie searching for help in an isolated landscape. Along the way, Elizabeth encounters dead bodies, zombie killers and survivors. Two in particular add so much to the film’s vibe, including Mirella Rancelot as a blind girl named Lucie and adult film star Brigette Lahaie as a woman in white.
The Grapes of Death was great. Within its low budget and exploitation demands, there is a strange and stark mood. Vaguely cult-like or apocalyptic, a village with flames and dead bodies, ordinary people stumbling through the night looking to attack, and Elizabeth’s fraying nerves. Kanopy has a great selection of Jean Rollin’s work available to stream; I’m also a fan of Requiem For A Vampire and The Iron Rose. Recommended.
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