Grapes of Death (1978)

[EvilNed]

Just caught this. Anyone seen it? Old french trashy and dreamy zombie film from Jean Rollin. I'm surprised I'd missed this one, never heard of it. This despite my decade plus interest in euro horror in general and zombie films in particular. Anyway... French girl escapes a psychotic lunatic on a train and travels rural french countryside by foot as she tries to make her way to a vineyard where her fiancée works. On the way she explores abandoned villages and encounters Crazies-like zombies that inhabit them. Good idea, but the production was overall pretty trashy.

[shootemindehead]

Saw it years ago as La Raisins de La Mort. It's pretty awful really, like all Rollin films. But it does have a certain captivation to it. Like Jess Franco films, there's atmosphere to it, but I'm just not entirely sure where the atmosphere comes from.

[EvilNed]

Saw it years ago as La Raisins de La Mort. It's pretty awful really, like all Rollin films. But it does have a certain captivation to it. Like Jess Franco films, there's atmosphere to it, but I'm just not entirely sure where the atmosphere comes from. I think a lot of it comes from lingering tele-shots of very creepy mediteranean scenery - and the rather eerie, but cheap, score slapped onto it. It's Franco-esque for sure. Just not very good... i prefer Franco, I think.

[shootemindehead]

I think a lot of it comes from lingering tele-shots of very creepy mediteranean scenery - and the rather eerie, but cheap, score slapped onto it. It's Franco-esque for sure. Just not very good... i prefer Franco, I think. I wouldn't class myself as a fan of either, but probably Franco wins that dubious award for me too. There's a WTF element to both that can be fascinating. The thing about Franco is that he could put a competent film together if he wanted to. Jean Rollin was just a chancer. As an aside, this was the cover of the video for 'Zombies Lake' that kid me saw in the 80's. It looked to me, at the time, to be something to rival 'Dawn of the Dead' the GOAT zombie movie. Fast forward 15 or so years and I actually get to see the thing and realise that it's a big pile of shite that was made for 2 quid and a bag of chips. As Kim Newman noted, it looked like a lot of the "budget" was spent down the pub, because the camera work was so shaky. But, I doubt the budget even stretched to a few pints after work. I also remember later, in the 90's, Redemption Video started putting out a lot of Rollin movies, which hadn't seen the light of day since their cinema release. Stuff like 'The Naked Vampire' and 'Shiver of the Vampire' and crap like that. There was this massive video shop that opened up near me that had everything (well, everything that wasn't banned in the 80's), including the boutique companies, like Redemption, and they had these films on their shelves. The guy behind the counter remarked one day to me that I was the only one who was taking these movies out. LOL, he must have thought that I was some kind of weirdo. I picked up the Fu Manchu movies there recently and I have never seen any of them (I don't count the Peter Sellers movie LOL) . But Franco was responsible for the last two pictures, 'The Blood of Fu Manchu' and 'The Castle of Fu Manchu'. It'll be interesting to see what he did with them.

[EvilNed]

I'm not a Franco completist by any measure - and the only Rollin films I've seen are the two ones discussed in this thread - Grapes and Lake (Lake is absolute garbage). Coincidentally - Zombie Lake is actually somewhat of a joint venture between Rollin and Franco. Franco wrote the script (all ten pages of it) before handing it over to Rollin. Zombie Lake just has the actors with green paint in their faces. Horrible. The music is maybe worse - it's atrocious. Grapes at least had some atmosphere, but Lake - which I've only seen once seventeen years ago but still remember quite well - is just... Horrible. Beyond horrible. Another french piece of shit is the cannibal-boom-attempt Cannibal Terror. Oh my god. It's so bad. What is with the french people, how hard could it be? Kinda odd that you were the only one, tho. I've met many people who are into this kind of trash. Maybe just a fluke.

[MinionZombie]

I gotta say, I kind of have a soft spot for Zombie Lake. https://deadshed.blogspot.com/2017/1...81-review.html The first I saw of it was via "Zombiethon" (a compilation of scenes from different zombie flicks), way back in the 90s IIRC, on one of the Sky MovieMax channels. The volleyball team swimming nude in the lake really captured my young mind! I've watched it a couple of times and the fact that it's so incompetent is part of the reason why I dig it. It's like a fever dream of ineptitude. Oasis of the Zombies, on the other hand, is just pretty bad ... mind you, I've only seen one version of that. I can't recall which, but I think it was the worse version (which I've got on DVD from like 17 years ago).

[Neil]

I wouldn't class myself as a fan of either, but probably Franco wins that dubious award for me too. There's a WTF element to both that can be fascinating. The thing about Franco is that he could put a competent film together if he wanted to. Jean Rollin was just a chancer. As an aside, this was the cover of the video for 'Zombies Lake' that kid me saw in the 80's. It looked to me, at the time, to be something to rival 'Dawn of the Dead' the GOAT zombie movie. Fast forward 15 or so years and I actually get to see the thing and realise that it's a big pile of shite that was made for 2 quid and a bag of chips. As Kim Newman noted, it looked like a lot of the "budget" was spent down the pub, because the camera work was so shaky. But, I doubt the budget even stretched to a few pints after work. I also remember later, in the 90's, Redemption Video started putting out a lot of Rollin movies, which hadn't seen the light of day since their cinema release. Stuff like 'The Naked Vampire' and 'Shiver of the Vampire' and crap like that. There was this massive video shop that opened up near me that had everything (well, everything that wasn't banned in the 80's), including the boutique companies, like Redemption, and they had these films on their shelves. The guy behind the counter remarked one day to me that I was the only one who was taking these movies out. LOL, he must have thought that I was some kind of weirdo. I picked up the Fu Manchu movies there recently and I have never seen any of them (I don't count the Peter Sellers movie LOL) . But Franco was responsible for the last two pictures, 'The Blood of Fu Manchu' and 'The Castle of Fu Manchu'. It'll be interesting to see what he did with them. Not to be confused with...

[EvilNed]

Don't knock Oasis of the Zombies! I gotta give that another spin.

[MinionZombie]

Don't knock Oasis of the Zombies! I gotta give that another spin. As plodding and generally kinda dull as Oasis of the Zombies is, I've nonetheless been inspired by it and its ilk for a particular scene in a particular script I wrote for a project that is currently being pitched. Even though I've only watched it once, and that was more than 15 years ago, I can still recall the two main pieces of music - that sort of spooky/sort of jaunty 'ethnic' piece, and then the 'moody zombie attack' bit of endlessly repetitive synth (e.g. when the zombies attack the encampment in the night). Best part of that movie, though, was the bit with the two ladies rocking up in a jeep and wandering about before they get attacked by zombies ... oh, and the one zombie with great big bulging fake eyes.