Les raisins de la mort

Plot synopsis:
When a worker at the Roublès winemaking vineyard becomes ill, complaining of a pain in his neck, his boss insists it's a minor injury and tells him to go back to work.
Élizabeth is travelling by train to Roublès to live with her fiancé, the owner of the vineyard. She makes a friend with a woman on the train. The worker with the neck pain boards the train and stares at Élizabeth's friend. Élizabeth becomes worried when her new friend excuses herself to visit the restroom and doesn't return for a long time; the man then comes and sits with her. The man's neck starts to bleed. Élizabeth escapes him and discovers her friend dead on the restroom floor.
Leaving the train, Élizabeth flees to a nearby village for help. A man and his daughter are sitting quietly inside a house. Élizabeth describes to them what happened, and they tell her to rest and recover from her shock. Panicking, she enters the bedroom and discovers a woman whose throat has been cut. The man's daughter calmly explains that the dead woman is her mother, and that her father killed her because he's become insane. The woman and Élizabeth leave the house, but her father catches them and rips open his daughter's blouse to reveal several wounds. He has the same wounds; so did the man on the train. He tells his daughter she will not suffer the way he did and sticks a garden fork into her chest. Élizabeth flees and takes the man's car. When he gets in front of it and begs her to kill him, she runs him over and drives off.
Élizabeth travels further into the village to look for help and is approached by a man whose head is covered with the infection. He smashes his head against the car window until it breaks and Élizabeth shoots him. She comes across a blind girl named Lucy who is searching for her caregiver, Lucas. Élizabeth helps her and discovers a lot of dead bodies covered with the infection. Lucy knows something is wrong but Élizabeth won't tell her so she runs of in search of Lucas. She eventually finds him, unaware he is infected and insane and he strangles her. Élizabeth hears her screams and finds her dead and tied up to a door, where Lucas chops off her head. As the zombies chase her, a woman rescues her. This woman has been trapped in a house for a few days, so she and Élizabeth try to get out and run, but the woman grabs Élizabeth and gives her to Lucas. Two men, Paul and Lucien show up and start to kill the zombies. The woman goes to them for help, so they tell her to wait by their truck. Élizabeth fights Lucas off and goes to the truck where she and the woman get into a fight, resulting in the woman getting her face burned. She then blows up the truck.
Élizabeth, Paul and Lucien walk to Roublès and on the way they discover that it was a wine festival on the Sunday before that caused the villagers to turn into zombies. Once they arrive at Roublès, Paul and Lucien have something to eat while Élizabeth searches for her fiancé. She finds him and discovers he is infected. Paul shoots him so Èlizabeth shoots Paul and then she shoots Lucien.

Tags: insanity, violence, murder

Review:
Lost in the rural expanse, the woman encounters various peasants who seem to have become trapped between life and death, driven mad by the pain of decaying alive, and more than eager to throttle her and visit various abuses upon her body (implied by the fact that any uninfected individual she comes across in her adventure inevitably takes the proverbial bullet for her - by pitchfork, hatchet, or whatever lethal tool the living `dead' have at hand at the moment).
Jean Rollin's "Grapes of Death" is a refreshing living dead poem, and an effective low key horror film from France's gentleman auteur.After Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) encounters a rotting man and the corpse of her traveling companion on a deserted train, she flees into the countryside where she must battle a plague of the sad, tortured dead.
Despite some ropey focus and action sequences that don't quite cut smoothly, this is the director's most technically polished work and an important addition to French "cinefantastique".Although the plot line bears some similarity to Romero's "The Crazies" and the visuals pre-date the recent dead-on-arrival French "Revenants" (see review), Rollin does not run this show along traditional genre lines.
Elizabeth's final reunion with her boyfriend has a sad, tragic quality that becomes, like the rest of the film, quite surreal.There is sporadic gore and the violence is shockingly sudden in parts, but Rollin's trademark dream-like pacing and social commentary are there to be enjoyed and appreciated..
Novice explorers of the European horror film or general fans of the zombie genre should be captured by the compact story of the lost girl in the near ancient village of zombies created by an uncannily debilitating batch of wine.
French director Jean Rollin is best known for his messy erotic vampire films, but Zombie Lake aside; he's actually a lot better at zombie films.
The title doesn't suggest a good film, but it refers to the movie's main plot point; namely, the fact that it's the French tradition of distilling wine that is to blame for the zombie outbreak.
It's points like this that make the film profoundly French and despite the fact that France doesn't seem like the ideal country for a zombie outbreak; the plot and location blend together rather nicely.
The journey turns awry when a man infected with the zombie virus boards the train, and our heroine finds her travel companion dead...and that's just the start of it!
The plot takes the familiar Night of the Living Dead style idea of the living trying to stay clear of the dead, but Rollin makes the film his own with a fine variety of weird and wonderful characters, and it usually turns out that these are more dangerous than the zombie hoards.
The rural setting provides a nice base for a zombie movie, as it's quite different from the usual urban setting, and this also blends well with Rollin's morbid atmosphere.
Creepy and Original 'Environmentalist' Zombie Gore Film by Jean Rollin.
"The Grapes of Death" (1977) a highly original, creepy, intelligent and overall very impressive Zombie/Gore film, which is by far my favorite of all the Rollin flicks I've seen.
"Les Raisins De La Mort" is a Zombie film with a somewhat environmentalist premise: In a mountainous, wine-drinking area of France, pesticides that are meant as insect repellents for grapes, turn the population sick and murderously insane...
"Les Raisins De La Mort" has the reputation of being one of the first French gore films, and it is also a highly effective one.
The cinematography and settings (beautiful French landscapes and villages) are extremely elegant, which is a quality that most Rollin films have.
Marie-Georges Pascal, who sadly committed suicide at age 39 in 1985, makes a likable protagonist as Élisabeth, a girl who gets lost in the land of the infested when trying to visit her fiancé, and Mirella Rancelot is memorable as a blind girl, a likable character whose stare into nonentity is both sympathy-evoking and slightly eerie.
The film delivers what gore fans expect, the zombie-makeup (the infested begin to get moldy and rot away) is extremely disgusting, and the gore effects are bloody as hell and very well done.
The score is pretty good and underlines the eerie atmosphere.Overall, this film delivers everything one might hope for in a Zombie film: a nice setting, suspense and creepiness, and loads of (both disturbing and disgusting) gore.
(No, I don't believe that this was intentional.) A couple huge dogs just show up at one point (which also makes no sense), wounds change locations, and some events were obviously intended to precede other events that now appear earlier in the film.Don't get me wrong, this film is worth your time if you're a fan, but it is definitely not a slick, finished product..
However, most rules have an exception and "Grapes" is an excellent example of such.Rather than following his usual blueprint of dreamy atmosphere, barely existent plots, sleepwalker-like acting and an abundance of useless lesbian activity, Rollin goes directly for the throat this trip.
Add the special appearance by the lovely Brigitte Lahaie and you've got a winner, but certainly lacking the cohesion (though wildly subversive and surreal -- though not so bizarre as Jess Franco's pictures) and tension of some of his more successful ventures like La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl), Requiem for a Vampire, The Shiver of the Vampires and others..
The basic premise of the film s that off a pesticide that has been sprayed on the grapes of a vineyard turn all those who consume the wine into some form of diseased zombie type.
This is my first experience of French horror and of the movies of Jean Rollin and I have to say I will be seeking out more of both on this showing.
The only Jean Rollin film I've really had interest in seeing turned out to be one of the slowest-moving zombie romps I've ever suffered through, and creating a bad zombie movie is a feat.
Unfortunately, an experimental pesticide infects the locals with a condition where they rot rapidly and become walking dead, and she's forced to flee the zombies and wander aimlessly through medieval-looking towns trying to find regular, live humans.
There's a good example in Rollin's zombie movie Les Raisins de la Mort.
Whatever the (doubtless perverse and sado-lesbian) reason, those scenes always manage a frisson for me.The story concerns a remote French region where some new pesticides are being sprayed on the grapes, somehow this is causing a plague of zombies.
Few directors I have seen understand the importance of location as much as Rollin.The film plays on urbanite fears of the countryside, that you get in giallo (House With Laughing Windows) as well as in American cinema (Deliverance).
You need to know in a horror film that there is no connection to familiar reality, no help coming, no unsevered umbilicus.It wouldn't be a great Jean Rollin film if we didn't get to see Brigitte Lahaie naked, and Rollin delivers on that again, as with the other two great movies of his I've seen, Fascination and La Nuit des Traquees.
Either way it has all the usual Rollin ingredients - gore, beautiful women, nudity, superb use of French rural locations and lashings of atmosphere.
Chased from her train by a bloodthirsty madman sporting a face of decaying flesh young Élisabeth flees into the desolate and bleak French countryside.Unbeknownst to our heroine an experimental pesticide has tainted the region's grape harvest and all imbibers of the local vintage have been viciously mutated into deranged zombie-like killers.It's hard to classify "The Grapes of Death" as a zombie film,mainly because it features living people driven into murderous rage by contaminated wine.As the most of Jean Rollin's works "The Grapes of Death" is set in an eerily isolated and lifeless landscape loaded with empty fields,misty bridges and crumbling houses.There is a good deal of gore including particularly gruesome decapitation and lovely full-frontal nudity scene provided by Brigitte Lahaie.8 out of 10..
Grapes of Death, The (1978) ** (out of 4) French horror film from cult director Jean Rollin has some nice moments but not enough.
In a small countryside village people are turning into crazed zombies after some dumb farmers accidentally put toxic on the grapes, which are turned into wine and drank by the locals.
Like many other Rollin films, this one here has some high moments as well as some slow moments but after hearing so many good things about this film I can't help but be disappointed.
Though not up to Rollin's ROSE OF IRON (1972) or THE LIVING DEAD GIRL (1981), this is still pretty good - forming with the latter and ZOMBIE LAKE (1980; which I haven't watched) a very loose trilogy.Still, it's not strictly a zombie film (as the 'monsters' here aren't flesh-eaters and don't even rise from the dead!) - though it carries much the same kind of menace as LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE (1974), also largely set in the countryside and displaying a concern for ecology in the modern world.
In this respect, the dreamy cinematography (which is sometimes out-of-focus) and the simple yet agreeable score (despite the admittedly grim subject matter) emerge as indelible assets to its ultimate quality.The film is quite gory and the ending downbeat, but Marie-Georges Pascal's bewildered heroine generates genuine audience sympathy - even if it's a fetching yet duplicitous Brigitte Lahaie (inexplicably unaffected by the plague which is ravaging the village) who steals the show with her brief but striking role!.
This film takes it's time in the usual French way.Hey this one's got good gore effects!!
Not bad at all.Another good scene is when the blind girl Lucy is crucified on the back door of a farmhouse and her provider comes out and chops her head off with an ax, blood spraying out everywhere...Then the gorgeous Bridgette Lahaie appears, looking normal but really isn't.
We get a nice full-frontal scene of her nude, too.It has one of those typical 1970s-style ambiguous endings where no one really wins, good or bad, so you'll have to see it for yourself.Excellent Synapse DVD with extras such as an interview with Rollin and Lahaie, who still looks gorgeous after 25 years.
Elizabeth comes across a house where she ask's for help, unfortunately the occupants are also infected with the sickness & it quickly becomes apparent that the mysterious infection has spread throughout the French countryside & Elizabeth must fight off the hordes of crazed villagers & find safety...This French production was co-written & directed by Jean Rollin & if you don't like his style of film-making then Les Raisins de la Mort will do little to change your opinion, it certainly hasn't changed mine.
The story, character's or situations just didn't grip or engage me & I found myself becoming more & more disinterested in what was, or in the case of Les Raisins de la Mort, what wasn't happening.Director Rollin as usual spends more time on the visual look of the film rather than the story.
Les Raisins de la Mort has a nice visual look, the bleak stark French countryside with it stone house village's makes for a nice isolated location although it does become monotonous eventually.
Contray to what you may have heard the gore is quite tame & the special make-up effects are generally poor as the infected villager's look like they have bits of pizza stuck on their faces.
I can't comment on the acting as the dialogue is spoken in French, so don't watch it if you don't like reading subtitles as I don't think an English dub version exists.Les Raisins de la Mort was disappointing as far as I'm concerned, I'd have preferred a zombie film with intestine eating & blood drinking rather than the infected villager's type thing we ended up with.
Traveling to meet her fiancé(..the very one responsible for making the pesticide causing the zombie plague)at the village vineyard of Rubelais, Elizabeth's(Marie-Georges Pascal)train stops at a station picking up an infected passenger who murders her traveling companion coming after her.
Along the way she runs into an infected father who murders his infected daughter right before her eyes with a pitchfork(..before crushing him with their car she leaves in), an infected man pleading for help bashing his oozing forehead through her car window, a blind girl needing directions back to her native village, the devastated village with burning bonfires spitting flame throughout while dead bodies lay rotting in the streets, village zombies with violent intent, the blind girl's infected boyfriend, and a crazy beauty(the ravishing Brigitte Lahaie..her scene in a see-through nightgown pulling two great danes is quite a memorable image to say the least) whose perfect naked body shows no signs of infection although she wears her lunacy like a badge of honor.
Rollin's take on the zombie genre isn't the same blunt instrument of grue that we often are used to seeing, although the French director does turn up the dial on delivering some nasty facial sores which release yucky colors and goo.
The French countryside is utilized by Rollin well(..would you expect anything otherwise?)showing us a gorgeous unpopulated picturesque space, uninhabited by the zombie hordes.
At least Jean Rollin tried to be different in that aspect, as so many zombie films were coming out around the time this movie was released.
Moreover, Rollin delivers several moments of pure gut-wrenching terror: a father murders his own daughter by running her through with a pitchfork, a village littered with freshly slain corpses, and a helpless blind girl being killed by her guardian who then strings up her body on a door and cuts off her head.
Kudos are in order for the sound acting by the sturdy cast: Pascal excels as the frightened, yet resilient heroine, Felix Marten contributes a solid turn as rugged no-nonsense peasant and war veteran Paul, and the gorgeous Brigitte Lahaie makes the most out of her memorably odd role as a shrewd infected woman who shows no external signs of the disease.
When settling down to watch a Jean Rollin film, the viewer is fairly sure it will contain either nude/semi-nude vampires, a beach scene, two young girls as main characters and/or much surrealist atmosphere.
At first, two girls appear to be the film's main double act, but one of them is killed a couple of scenes later in one of many shock twists this tale has to offer.This is Rollin's most straightforward horror film.
Of course, there are scenes that border on the dreamlike, such as a blind girl dressed in white tiptoeing unknowingly into the path of many zombie-like creatures that literally stumble out of the shadows.There also appears to be a decent budget here, one that provides a realistic beheading (another unexpected moment), many explosive effects and some truly repellent make-up for the many characters infected by the 'grapes of death'.
The film is set in the French countryside where wine is turning the people into crazed "zombies" and one girl has to fight her way through to reach her lover.
But, judging from the high level of acclaim, those other horror fans I was talking about earlier...you know, the ones who like Rollin...apparently love this film.
It's like the director or producer thought he needed a "money shot." That's the most unconvincing moment in the movie, the low point of an otherwise pretty decent, paranoid, nicely photographed nightmare with character touches and subversive elements.By the way, my favorite element is the fact that the baddies aren't real "living dead" zombies and they don't want to eat the living.
so I found that on the association of the events with some christian ideas this film's motives become available, and the message of the director comes through better than "Just a zombie movie".
I am no zombie film enthusiast by any means and I had never before seen any of Jean Rollin's work but I went into this expecting to be at least entertained by a dumb fun gore flick in the vein of Zombie Flesh Eaters.
If that's the case then may I be stricken by lightening this very day, because what I saw was not only a complete and utter failure in every aspect but also one of the worst films I have seen in my life.The plot, for what its worth, revolves around a young woman who, after surviving an attack from a diseased man aboard a deserted train, finds herself lost in the French countryside.
Horror films tend to have more than their fair share of annoying characters, those dumbasses who are just begging to be butchered, but the main girl in this is so dense that she makes the average slasher movie chick look like Stephen Hawkins.
As for the blind girl character, if I ever hear the name 'Jaques' again I think I will turn more insane than the infected in this film.
One of the Better Films Directed by Jean Rollin.
Even so, the director (Jean Rollin) managed to bring the same ghastly features one would expect to see in a zombie movie and for that reason I figure the comparison isn't too far off.
In any case, I enjoyed this movie and consider it as possibly one of the better films directed by Jean Rollin.
From acclaimed cult French director Jean Rollin comes this interesting and enjoyable horror film, one that could best be described as an escalating nightmare.
It usually wasn't Rollins' style to "frighten" his viewers, or to take his movies in a commercial direction, but he successfully does these things with "The Grapes of Death".Marie-Georges Pascal stars as Elizabeth, a young woman travelling by train to be with her fiancée.
Rollins' film doesn't have much in the way of story but makes up for that with a pretty good pace, a fair deal of tension, plenty of shots of the gorgeous French countryside, and even a little bit of political / social commentary injected into the dialogue.