Review by Steve D. Stones
Although made in 1978, the opening scene
of The Grapes of Death (French title Les Raisins De La Mort!) reflects the times in which we live today with the
Coronavirus pandemic. Winery workers dressed in cloth coverings and masks on
their faces walk the fields of the Roubles wine making vineyard in central
France while spraying pesticides on the grape crops. Tractors also drive over
the fields spraying pesticides.
A young vineyard
worker named Kowalski collapses in the arms of his supervisor after driving the
fields in a tractor and complains of having a fever and neck pains. The boss
dismisses his complaints and orders him back to the fields to work. He tells
Kowalski that more tightly fitting masks are soon to arrive.
After his shift,
Kowalski boards a train with only two other young women college students on
board who are traveling to Spain. One of the girls named Elizabeth (Marie
George Pascal) leaves her compartment on the train to find another empty
compartment. While Elizabeth sits in the compartment reading a magazine,
Kowalski enters the compartment and sits down. His neck and face begin to drip
with a disgusting ooze of pus. This frightens Elizabeth, so she runs out of the
compartment as Kowalski slowly chases after her. Elizabeth finds her friend
Brigitte dead in another compartment. She pulls the emergency stop cord on the
train and quickly runs from the train.
After walking
for hours in the French countryside, Elizabeth arrives in a small village and
runs to knock on the doors of local residents to get help and call the police.
She enters the home of Antoinette (Patricia Cartier) and her father.
Antoinette's father has a strange growth on his left hand – similar to the
growth Elizabeth saw on Kowalski's neck and face on the train. The father and
daughter offer Elizabeth a glass of wine as she desperately pleads to use their
telephone to call the police. They tell her that their phone and car do not
work.
Antoinette and
her father insist that Elizabeth stay with them as she tries to flee the house.
She is taken to a bedroom upstairs where she finds Antoinette's mother lying
dead on a bed with her throat slashed. Antoinette explains to Elizabeth that it
was her father that killed her mother. She gives Elizabeth the car keys to
leave the village, but both girls are confronted by the father as they try to
leave the house. Antoinette is raped and impaled with a pitch fork by her
father as Elizabeth leaves the house in the car.
After crushing
Antoinette's father against a rock with the car, Elizabeth drives to another
nearby village and is confronted by another young man who has a strange growth
on his forehead oozing with pus. Elizabeth leaves the car after shooting the
man in the head with a gun. She then encounters Lucy (Mirella Rancelot), a
blind girl who has wandered away from the nearby village.
Nailed to a door
in crucifixion style, Lucy is found raped and dead, killed by her brother
Lucas. Lucas decapitates Lucy in the most gruesome scene of the film. The
village zombies begin to chant - “Lucy, we love you, Lucy, we love you”
Elizabeth is
pulled into a house in the village by porn actress Brigitte Lahaie. Lahaie's
character does not have a name in the film, so I will refer to her as Lahaie.
Elizabeth is told by Lahaie that the house is owned by the local mayor and his
wife, both were killed by the villagers. She also tells Elizabeth that they
will be safe if they remain in the house.
Eventually
leaving the mayor's house, Lahaie incapacitates Elizabeth outside the house so
the zombie villagers can attack her. In a sexy see-thru night gown, Lahaie
blazes the town with a torch while walking two dogs. Two men in a pick up
truck, Paul (Felix Marten) and his friend Lucien (Serge Marquand) arrive to
save Elizabeth. Lahaie removes her night gown to prove to the two men that she
is not marked like the rest of the village zombies. Director Jean Rollin never
misses an opportunity to show naked female flesh in his films, as Lahaie has
done for him many times.
Elizabeth, Paul
and Lucien eventually make their way to the vineyard where Elizabeth's fiance
Michel (Michel Herval) is employed. The trio determine that the zombie outbreak
of the villagers must have been a result of the wine consumed by the villagers
at the Grape Harvest Festival a week earlier. Paul and Lucien claim they were
immune because they drank beer at the festival instead of wine.
It's no mistake
that throughout the entire film Elizabeth wears a purple colored shirt, the
color of grapes and royalty, as she stands in a winery tank at the end of the
film with the purple walls of the tank sharply contrasting the purple of her
shirt. The blood of her fiance Michel drips on her face from above the tank.
The blood sacrifice symbolism in Christianity is apparent in this final
sequence of the film – both with the blood on Elizabeth's face and the
reference of wine as part of the sacrificial ritual. This scene connects well
with the crucifixion of Lucy in an earlier scene. I'm not sure if director
Rollin had this symbolism in mind as he constructed the final scene, but
viewers could certainly interpret it this way.
The Grapes of
Death may be Rollin's most commercial effort in film making and is said to be
the first French zombie film. It is certainly Rollin's most frightening and
well-made film. Most of Rollin's previous films are an exercise in strange
surrealism and have interesting elements of experimentation to them. The Grapes
of Death has often been compared to George Romero's Night of The Living Dead
(1968) and The Crazies (1973). Both Romero and Rollin employ zombies to
communicate the perils of a natural disaster. Happy viewing. (Watch the trailer here.)
