Just recently I watched Grapes of Death, a wonderful French zombie film from the golden age of genre films (the 1970s). I did not watch it on my laptop however, because my infuriating DVD drive has become even less accepting than usual in regards to the discs I try to play in it. I can't even watch my copy of Blood and Black Lace anymore! I payed 20 bucks for that movie (not counting postage)!

Anyway, Grapes of Death is an excellent and very strange film filled with wooden acting and things that don't really make sense.  A pair of young women are attacked during a train ride by a lunatic covered in open sores. One of the girls is killed, but the other (the brunette, naturally), escapes and spends the rest of the film wandering around the French countryside being menaced by people who have been rendered murderously insane, pus-oozing well, sort-of-zombies. Really they aren't zombies at all, so much as they are just people who've been driven mad by the pesticide trace elements of which have found their way into the local wine stock. Anyway, this is a good thing, as it gives a break from the usual zombie formula of long periods barricaded up inside some large building culminating in the destruction of the safe haven due to bickering on the part of the humans. That was good in Night of the Living Dead, and I guess ripping it off for a few million other movies seemed like a surefire idea. it might have been, twenty years ago, but my previously undying enthusiasm for the formula has begun to waver slightly.

Anyway, this all leads the brunette, whose name I've forgotten, to hang-out with a blind chick, almost get murdered by the ludicrously attractive Brigitte Lahaie (really, the woman is astonishingly pretty), and then team-up with a couple of sane fellows who pack rifles and dynomite and make the final trek to the town where she was supposed to be meeting her fiance.

I liked it! It's beautifully shot, the French countryside is nothing of not a novel setting for a zombie movie (although, I guess the fact that the whole outbreak of lunatics is caused in large part by grapes could give it some sort of tenuous link to The Day of the Triffids, if one were squinting and also drunk - and hey! Both films have blind chicks in them!), and the decidely weird nature of the threat itself makes everything all the more disconcerting. I especially like that aspect of the film - despite being a thoroughly gory film with lots of boobs and blood and boobs covered in blood, the central horror of the film comes from how weird everything is. I wouldn't exactly call Grapes of Death a horror film of ideas, but Jean Rollin does manage to create a very curious atmosphere, where everything becomes quite nebulous and alarming and creepy synthesiser music plays as people run through pointy rock formations and lots of fog. Rollin also manages to pull this off better than a lot of the big-name Italians (although i wouldn't begin to say that the film as a whole is as good as something like The Beyond or Suspiria), by creating a dream-like and fragmented scenario within a landscape that doesn't clash with it at all - i.e. a plotless and languid film doesn't seem nearly as stupid when the scenario does not require a plot and people are roaming through the green hills of Arcady. This probably makes it seem slightly less weird at times than it actually is, but it also stops Grapes of Death from seeming as silly as it sometimes actually is.

That said, I really wish Rollin had kept the politics as a subtext in this film. The conversations between the brunette's (what was her name?) two rescuers just come-off ham-fisted and dumb, and seem to be taxing the film-makers' abilities as writers of dialogue. it definately seems that this film came-off as well as it did because it coasts by  on images and actions more than writing.

That said, I do like some of the writing! I think the best stuff remains unsaid, like the very subtle set-up for just why (apart from the obvious reasons) the brunette (Elisabeth! I looked it up) does what she does at the end of the film. When people open their mouths it can get pretty silly.

Anyway, I would definitely recommend the film. It's technically excellent (especially the gore effects - I'm still trying to figure-out the mechanics of that pitchfork scene), a fun premise and many of the better aspects of 70s horror without too many of the downsides. It's not exactly a masterpiece, but it works quite well.

Also, my CD player keeps refusing to play my burnt CDs. I am irked. There are only so many times that I can listen to Led Zeppelin IV before growing tired of it (five times).