Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Uriah43 While taking the train from Paris to a small village to see her fiancé, "Elisabeth" (Marie-Georges Pascal) is attacked by a zombie and forced to pull the emergency switch in order to escape. Upon reaching the nearest house she is again attacked by another zombie and again barely manages to escape into the countryside. Soon she finds the village where her fiancé lives and is horrified to discover that zombies have taken it over and that she is one of the very few people who happens to be uninfected. Now, some people might suggest that technically these people weren't actually zombies and they would probably be correct. Even so, the director (Jean Rollin) managed to bring the same ghastly features one would expect to see in a zombie movie and for that reason I figure the comparison isn't too far off. In any case, I enjoyed this movie and consider it as possibly one of the better films directed by Jean Rollin. Be that as it may, although it's certainly not a great film by any means I liked it and for that reason I have rated it accordingly and recommend it to all zombie enthusiasts.

Nigel P When settling down to watch a Jean Rollin film, the viewer is fairly sure it will contain either nude/semi-nude vampires, a beach scene, two young girls as main characters and/or much surrealist atmosphere. Such things are the staple of the prolific French director.It's something of a surprise then, to find none of these elements here. At first, two girls appear to be the film's main double act, but one of them is killed a couple of scenes later in one of many shock twists this tale has to offer.This is Rollin's most straightforward horror film. And it is truly frightening. Of course, there are scenes that border on the dreamlike, such as a blind girl dressed in white tiptoeing unknowingly into the path of many zombie-like creatures that literally stumble out of the shadows.There also appears to be a decent budget here, one that provides a realistic beheading (another unexpected moment), many explosive effects and some truly repellent make-up for the many characters infected by the 'grapes of death'. The scenery is breath-taking and beautifully shot – often in conditions so cold, that apparently the putrefaction make-up would freeze to the actors' faces.Through it all, seemingly immune to the virus, is Elisabeth (Marie George Pascal) – well, until the final scene; the film is open-ended, open to interpretation. I would recommend this to anyone new to Rollin's work.My favourite scene involves a decaying man who chases Elisabeth back into her parked car, which naturally fails to start. As she locks the doors, he head-butts the glass to the front door, leaving much of his dissolving forehead on the glass as he recoils to butt it again. Truly stomach churning.

Scarecrow-88 A grape harvest festival, located in a wine region of France, yields an infected village..those who drank wine made from a nearby vineyard, whose grapes were sprayed with a created pesticide, are infected with flesh-eating sores which ooze puss and blood, rotting their brains causing homicidal mania to the point that they turn on those they love. Traveling to meet her fiancé(..the very one responsible for making the pesticide causing the zombie plague)at the village vineyard of Rubelais, Elizabeth's(Marie-Georges Pascal)train stops at a station picking up an infected passenger who murders her traveling companion coming after her. Fleeing the train, Elizabeth enters the vast landscape of a beautiful French countryside, with "rocks everywhere reaching to the sky like trees", not knowing what terrors await her. Along the way she runs into an infected father who murders his infected daughter right before her eyes with a pitchfork(..before crushing him with their car she leaves in), an infected man pleading for help bashing his oozing forehead through her car window, a blind girl needing directions back to her native village, the devastated village with burning bonfires spitting flame throughout while dead bodies lay rotting in the streets, village zombies with violent intent, the blind girl's infected boyfriend, and a crazy beauty(the ravishing Brigitte Lahaie..her scene in a see-through nightgown pulling two great danes is quite a memorable image to say the least) whose perfect naked body shows no signs of infection although she wears her lunacy like a badge of honor. Luckily for Elizabeth, she is rescued by two uninfected construction workers, Paul(Félix Marten), with rifle in tow, and Lucien(Serge Marquand)with the necessary sticks of dynamite when needed. Making their way to the vineyard of her fiancé, Elizabeth will seek her love for answers to what caused such a horrifying ordeal. Tragic consequences ensue.Have you ever seen a sophisticated zombie gore film? Rollin's take on the zombie genre isn't the same blunt instrument of grue that we often are used to seeing, although the French director does turn up the dial on delivering some nasty facial sores which release yucky colors and goo. The pitchfork scene is certainly a highlight..and Rollin's camera remains on the victim's stabbed body as she dies with the pitchfork sticking out. The French countryside is utilized by Rollin well(..would you expect anything otherwise?)showing us a gorgeous unpopulated picturesque space, uninhabited by the zombie hordes. Certainly an alternative to the awful low budget bloodbaths that have glutted movie shelves since Romero's movies broke the cinematic mold for gory violence. Not to say Rollin doesn't display a few gruesome highlights despite the pitchfork scene. One wacky moment shows an infected citizen beheading his female lover, stuck to a door with nails through her hands, and blouse ripped displaying her breasts! Oh, and Rollin adds to the hysteria of the scene by showing him planting a slobbery kiss to the lips of the disembodied head as he dies! Lahaie sure captures your attention as well..she disrobes in a completely gratuitous scene showing the two uninfected males that she has no sores. Pascal, as the tragic heroine, tries to show a woman losing her sanity as she bares witness to the non-stop parade of insanity occurring around her. I found her a bit over the top, but I guess we must look at what was happening and put her character's plight into proper perspective. Here's Lahaie, having arranged for the zombies to have their way with her, coming towards Liz with a lighted stick as flames threaten to burn her face. If that wasn't enough, she watches as an innocent falls prey to her infected lover, not being able to stop what will eventually happen. And, to cap it off, Liz must face the fact that her fiancé not only caused the plague but is also a victim of his creation. So, I guess I can see some heightened overacting(..pulling into her hair, screeching, with eyes bulging)being feasible under the circumstances. At the very end, Pascal displays her character as a silent shell of her former self, no longer the young woman full of life at the very beginning..Elizabeth has been put through the ringer. Although, "The Iron Rose" is still my personal favorite Rollin film, this may very well be his best one. I think "Grapes of Death" certainly shows a filmmaker who has taken complete command of his craft.

fertilecelluloid Jean Rollin's "Grapes of Death" is a refreshing living dead poem, and an effective low key horror film from France's gentleman auteur.After Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) encounters a rotting man and the corpse of her traveling companion on a deserted train, she flees into the countryside where she must battle a plague of the sad, tortured dead. The "grapes" of the title relate to the cause of the spreading problem.Rollin's films have always found horror and dread in rural landscapes and crumbling architecture; in "Grapes" the fascination with these elements continues and is intensified by suitably evocative photography. Despite some ropey focus and action sequences that don't quite cut smoothly, this is the director's most technically polished work and an important addition to French "cinefantastique".Although the plot line bears some similarity to Romero's "The Crazies" and the visuals pre-date the recent dead-on-arrival French "Revenants" (see review), Rollin does not run this show along traditional genre lines. Instead, he has the heroine Pascal encountering a blind woman who is oblivious to the contagion and a recluse (Brigitte Lahaie) who may be her savior in a white nightie. Elizabeth's final reunion with her boyfriend has a sad, tragic quality that becomes, like the rest of the film, quite surreal.There is sporadic gore and the violence is shockingly sudden in parts, but Rollin's trademark dream-like pacing and social commentary are there to be enjoyed and appreciated.