Les Raisins de la mort

“What happened with those French yokels?” - “Too much booze.” This isn’t a quote from the film, I’ve made it up! :-D, but it could easily be. The Raisins of Death is a classic example of 1970s Eurohorror: great atmosphere, good gore, Southern European countryside, little villages, pretty awful actors and zero logic in the story and the actions of the characters. An example (not literal, unfortunately): Blind woman: “Tell me what it looks like here!” – Heroine: “There are some crags...” - Blind woman: “Aha, I know where we are”, and without any mistakes she tells the heroine how to get to a far away village. But the atmosphere and the pretty nasty infected deserves four stars. (28/05/2010)

Along with Jesús Franco, Jean Rollin is one of the most overrated directors in the area of trash movies. Some filmmakers are deservedly renowned for their ability to make formulaic sequences more interesting despite limited budgets or, as the case may be, to draw dramatic potential out of a weak story and construct a narrative on it. Conversely, Rollin proves to be a desperate dilettante who completely squanders any potential with his futile directing. This is extremely obvious in The Grapes of Death, which a more capable director could have turned into a devastatingly intense horror movie, but Rollin turns the strong screenplay into a formalistically dismal bit of naïveté. Somewhere inside the film, there is the potential for a unique, gloomy horror movie that would turn the concept of apocalyptic zombie flicks on its head. Whereas such movies set most of the action in interiors, which, as symbols of home, protect the characters against the evil coming from outside, this time the female protagonist walks through a spectral landscape of desolate French mountains with old stone farmhouses and dilapidated homes. The agoraphobic motif is then combined with claustrophobic paranoia in the second half of the film, when it becomes clear that the villages and buildings offer no escape from the infection that is spreading through the countryside. Like Romero’s The Crazies, from which this film is clearly derived, places of civilisation become scenes of the breakdown of civilisational rationality and community when infection robs people of reason. An amusing curiosity is the purely French motif of the spread of infection, which takes place here through infected grapes and the wine made from them, which puts beer drinkers in the role of saviours of the world and exterminators of the infected. Unfortunately, all of the film’s positive aspects and potential are nullified the amateurish treatment and non-dramatically realised sequences, as well as the overall lack of motivation and the half-baked nature of the whole thing. (10/05/2015)

La France, pays des vignobles. OK, mais qu’adviendrait-il si cette activité, à cause des pesticides qu’elle utilise, devenait le berceau d’une étrange contamination ? Jean Rollin a créé un spécimen visuellement percutant de film d’épouvante apocalyptique – un film dans lequel des habitants du sud de la France se transforment en monstres azimutés (et qui semble s’être lourdement inspiré de The Crazies de George A. Romero). En le regardant, on se demande parfois s’il ne serait pas plus sage d’oublier le vin et de se prendre une chope à la place ! Les paysages désertiques du midi de la France parsemés de ruines de maisons abandonnées donnent ce petit cachet idéal pour construire l’ambiance horrifique, mais, malheureusement, à cause de l’action complètement éclatée et des personnages au comportement irrationnel, le potentiel est gaspillé. Il est d’ailleurs préférable de ne pas analyser les agissements des différents protagonistes, au risque de gâcher irrémédiablement son plaisir. Et c'est bien dommage, parce qu’avec un scénario mieux écrit et plus allègre et un jeu d’acteur plus convaincant, ce spectacle horrifique prometteur aurait pu devenir un chef-d’œuvre cauchemardesque. (22/03/2020)