The Grapes of Death Blu-ray Review
Mine eyes have seen the gory...
Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, April 19, 2013
Kino-Lorber and Redemption Films are back with another round of films by low-budget Euro-sleaze auteur Jean Rollin, best known for his
many,
many,
many lesbian vampire movies. His penchant for sapphic bloodsuckers certainly defined
his early career—which blended
le fantastique and dreamy surrealism with campily erotic softcore—but by the late 1970s, Rollin had
transitioned to shooting more straightforward grindhouse pornos, making eleven in two short years under the pseudonyms "Michael Gentil" and
"Robert Xavier." His following three movies under his own name are among his most unusual, and show a willingness to explore some new thematic
territory.
1978's
The Grapes of Death is a kind of French-ified version of George Romero's
The Crazies, the following year's
Fascination
looks at sanguinary obsession from a different and surprisingly elegant perspective, and 1980's
The Night of the Hunted is a strange piece of
proto-Cronenbergian psycho-oddity. Kino/Redemption released
Fascination a few months ago, but this week we'll be taking a look at
Grapes and
Hunted.
The Grapes of Death sees the director getting into the then-lucrative gore/zombie movie sub-genre. Rollin being Rollin, however, his take on
the subject matter is dreamier and slower-paced than that of many of his contemporaries.
Grapes' title sequence opens in provincial France,
where a team of farmhands is advancing through a vineyard, spraying pesticides and wearing ineffective-looking filter masks over their mouths. As the
film's title appears over a close-up freeze-frame of one of the workers, Kowalski, we hear only the man's labored breathing. Later, when he nearly falls
off of his tractor and complains to his supervisor, Michel (Michel Herval), that his lymph nodes feel swollen, we're clued in to the horrors to come.
Michel says new airtight masks for the workers should be arriving soon, but soon—of course—isn't soon enough.
Rollin then takes us onboard a train nearly deserted except for our brunette protagonist, Elizabeth (Marie Georges-Pascal), and her blonde best friend,
traveling together on holiday. They remark on how eerie it is to be alone on the train, and it
is eerie, all long corridors and empty
compartments. It gets even spookier when a single passenger boards at the stop nearest the vineyard and proceeds to sit directly across from Elizabeth
while her friend is in the restroom. It's Kowalski, and we notice along with Liz the rotting, oozing lesion on his neck, which quickly spreads to his face.
She flips out and runs from her compartment toward the water closet—with Kowalski in shambling pursuit—only to find that her friend has already
been murdered. Elizabeth pulls the brake line, hops off the train, and crosses an ominously foggy bridge into the village surrounding the vineyard,
where the rest of the film will take place.
The villagers have all been infected by a disease that causes them to sprout nasty flesh wounds and mentally deteriorate over time, progressing from
conscious-but-uncontrollably-violent to mindless, shuffling drones. They're not the undead, exactly, but they're definitely zombies of a type. Basically,
they have a toned-down version of the "rage virus" from
28 Days Later, and Elizabeth will spend the majority of the movie darting from the
safety of one stone farmhouse hovel to another, trying to avoid these blank-eyed automatons.
The film plays out in a series of episodic encounters with both the afflicted and the few rare uninfected folks still hanging around. When Elizabeth
storms in on a farmer with a putrescent hand having an awkwardly silent dinner with his daughter, she tries to aid the girl's escape, only to see her
speared below her breast with a pitchfork, Rollin's camera zooming in on her torn open blouse to give us a leering closeup of the pierced flesh. Elizabeth
isn't much help to anyone, really, and those she attempts to assist all end up dead. In the film's most memorable sequence, she guides a blind woman
through town, looking for the woman's caregiver. When they finally find him, he crucifies his former charge upon a wooden door, decapitates her with
a hatchet—as arterial blood spurts in gooey arcs—and then carries her (obviously fake) head around by the hair like a grotesque lantern. It might be
the biggest gross-out practical effects gag of Rollin's career. There's also a great—if unintentionally hilarious—scene with a ghoul who bludgeons his
pus-covered forehead against a car window until the glass shatters. Oh, and stick around for the appearance of softcore actress and Rollin regular
Brigitte Lahaie, who's essentially in here for a little gratuitous T&A.
The Grapes of Death makes a decent entry point into Rollin's filmography; it has many of his eccentricities and preoccupations—a heavy
funereal vibe, crumbling buildings, out-of-nowhere nudity—with a story that's perhaps more easily accessible for the uninitiated than some of his
earlier movies. Where his 1960s vampire films seem to exist in a strange and flighty alternate fairytale universe,
The Grapes of Death—with its
environmentalist premise and the occasionally political dialogue between two farmers that Elizabeth ultimately teams up with—feels more rooted in the
real world and carries more of a visceral impact. Just be aware that this isn't a George Romero-style zombie picture; in typical Rollin fashion,
Grapes meanders, more concerned with atmosphere than action or even story.
The Grapes of Death Blu-ray, Video Quality
If you've been following Kino-Lorber and Redemption Films' series of Jean Rollin releases, you'll already know what to expect from
The Grapes of
Death's Blu-ray treatment—a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer of a print that's essentially presented "as-is." White and black specks, bits of debris,
small scratches—the age-related damage is near-constant. As regrettable as it may be, no one is going to
spend the time and money to do a frame-by-frame restoration of a niche title like this. As I've argued before, though, I don't think this is necessarily a
bad thing. For one, the gritty print does enhance the mood of the film in a way—it has a grimy authenticity—and two, the lack of any digital cleanup
means less room for other picture quality blunders like overzealous digital noise reduction and edge enhancement, neither of which are present here.
The simple act of remastering the movie in high definition yields wonderful results. While there are plenty of amateurishly out-of-focus shots, clarity is
greatly improved from DVD, and color is vibrant and stable, with good contrast and image density.
The Grapes of Death certainly looks better on
Blu-ray than it has since it first made the rounds on Europe's grindhouse circuit.
