Review: The Grapes of Death (1978)

(aka Les Raisins de La Mort, Pesticide)
Directed by: Jean Rollin
Starring: Marie-Georges Pascal, Félix Marten, Serge Marquand
Written by: Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Christian Meunier, Jean Rollin
Music by: Philippe Bissmann
Country: France
Available on: Blu-ray (Redemption Films/Kino Lorber)
IMDb

To be honest, I avoided watching this movie for a long time because the title is awful. Yes, many people insisted it was a worthy entry in zombie canon, but how could it be so? It could be so because The Grapes of Death is atmospheric as hell, filled with barren landscapes draped in writhing mist and the dying carrion of human society. I’m still expanding my familiarity with Jean Rollin’s films, having only seen Fascination (1979) prior to this, but I’m definitely picking up what Monsieur Rollin is putting down. Teenage me, desperate for gore and rotting corpses eating living people, would have hated this, but 40-year-old me, desperate for anything different from an absolutely saturated field of zombie movies, loved this beautiful film. The Grapes of Death doesn’t deliver a whole lot of what the average fan of the undead is after. The viscera, though definitely a ratchet upwards from Fascination, is still tame by George A. Romero standards, and the ghouls, who really are more disease-ridden humans than true zombies, mostly look alive but with some oozing boils on their faces. There isn’t a lot of action to speak of; in fact, the plot mostly consists of our heroine Élizabeth wandering from locale to locale, alternating run-ins with the still-living and the soon-to-be-undead. But where the film really delivers is in its glorious bleakness and surprising political commentary. I’m not sure I’ve seen a movie make pallorous gray look more vibrant. Every new landscape is more drab and gorgeous than the last, and this enveloping desolation makes it clear that Élizabeth, no matter where she goes, will always end up at her ruin. And indeed, this movie’s finale is poetically somber. Along the way, the film works in commentary on the perils of fascism and France’s xenophobia, in a mostly unforced way. The score here is odd, at times sounding overly happy and carnival-like while sometimes falling lockstep with the dolorous hues. As with Fascination, the characters are never especially developed, but they’re all entrancing in a way — their motivations often obscured, their personalities kept at a distance. But all of this all works together to propel a nightmarish slice of apocalyptic cinema, though on a more intimate and affecting scale.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10