Popular reviews

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★★ 8

  I’ve had a deep fascination with Jean Rollin’s work since the late early 2000’s when my cousin showed me, ironically enough, Fascination, and over the past few years I’ve been delving deeper into his catalog with Kino Lorber’s ‘The Cinema Jean Rollin’ blurays, revisiting favorites, as well as films I haven’t seen and it’s been quite a journey, filled with exquisite cinematography, unorthodox plot development coupled with artful yet sparse dialogue, erotic everything, bonkers finales, and fixations with rural landscapes and crumbling architecture... all coated in a thick and dreamy surreal aesthetic that calmly screams fantastique..

  After Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal who I LOVE in this) encounters a decaying homicidal man and the corpse of her traveling partner on a deserted…

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  Review by Tony the Terror 666 ★★★★★ 12

  Hooper part V: A Second Beginning

  4/31: an anniversary film

  
  This was......amazing. It’s only by second Rollin film and it’s really left me wondering how I managed to become such a hardcore horror fanatic without ever experiencing his films until recently. I guess nobody’s perfect after all huh?

  Pesticides turning villagers into zombies is some great 70’s eco-terror that is still relevant today, if not more so. There’s some good gore, including a guy who has a giant blister-like welt on the side of his face that starts to ooze blood in a honeycomb like pattern (trypophobics beware) and a truly great decapitation. Brigitte Lahaie is fabulous and her character was so bizarre and incredibly watchable that I really wanted to…

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★★½

  The Grapes of Death is Jean Rollin's moody trip into the French countryside, where all the locals have become pus-ridden festering zombies thanks to some contaminated wine! The plot is kind of similar to the earlier Spanish zombie film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, but the similarities end there. Rollin's film is a haunting journey into a world where humanity has brought all the horror upon itself. The simple country life invaded by meddling scientific efforts. The rustic aesthetic is well captured by the director and this bodes well with the eerie score and soft focus. The pace is slow but deliberate, even during the more violent scenes - the director really squeezes out every ounce of atmosphere. Marie-Georges Pascal is…

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★★ 3

  Hooptober 9.0, pt.37- Love Beyond Death

  11/6 Countries (Spain, UK, Japan, USA, Canada, Poland, Hong Kong, Russia, Mexico, Czechia, Australia) (COMPLETE)
  12/8 Decades (1970s, 1980s, 1960s, 2020s, 1990s, 2010s, 1920s, 1910s, 1950s, 1930s, 2000s, 1940s) (COMPLETE)
  2/1- Bloodthirsty Old People

  Part 2 of my Second Hoopings List!

  4th Jean Rollin (after Two Orphan Vampires, Night of the Hunted and The Iron Rose)

  Rollin's zombies are so beautiful. They lose their reason but not their capacity to love. What comes from that love is perverted by madness, driving them to murder and mutilation, but it's still love, a relentless clinging attachment to someone that they never can get rid of. It's why Lucas carries Lucie's head with him, why the farmer…

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  Review by laird 1

  Les Crazies

  Far more "action" and gunplay than I would have expected from old Johnny Rollin. The image of Brigitte Lahaie carrying a burning branch and walking two giant dogs (a la Barbara Steele in Black Sunday) is pure gothic bliss. The image of a dying ghoul giving his wife's severed head a final smooch while jaunty synth pulses on the soundtrack is pure Eurohorror bliss.

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★ 6

  A sommelier’s worst nightmare. Me? I get awful heartburn, so I simply would not drink the wine. But, the thought of being the only one left who has yet to become a zombie-adjacent-tueur, as I roam the French countryside aimlessly, lookin’ for aid but finding only murderous post-winos? Pretty goddamn terrifying. And while this sense of primal terror is generally well-conveyed here, The Grapes of Death is missing something that makes the best Rollin pictures transcendent for me. Don’t get me wrong, I dug this—and there were a couple of scenes I really loved—but the heights he reaches in The Iron Rose and Lips of Blood (and even The Living Dead Girl) proved difficult to match for the master of fantasique, even in such a delightfully undead pastoral escapade as this.

  There seem to be two distinct tiers in Rollin’s catalog for me personally: ‘superlative’ and ‘pretty good’—this one falls into the latter.

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  Review by Liz ★★★★½

  A drifting nightmare; a fugue state with no release, just a freeze frame and roll credits. More Messiah of Evil than Night of the Living Dead. So many things here make me think of Fulci -- the endless, decaying countrysides, the goopy, pus-filled gore, the blind girl -- but this is an altogether different type of dream than he'd ever conjure up.

  This is why I don't drink.

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  Review by Justin Decloux ★★★★ 2

  One of the great zombie films and a grand entry into the "FEELS LIKE A NIGHTMARE YOU'RE EXPERIENCING" genre.

  Fuck the websites that told me this was boring in 2003.

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  Review by Disgustipated ★★★★★ 4

  Blood and Poetry - A Jean Rollin Retrospective #2

  Several years ago I was at a vineyard in the Hunter Valley. As I swished a drop of wine about my palate with a suitably raised pretentious eyebrow, the owner was babbling on about this and that. Primarily, he shared with us a few touching vignettes about growing up on the vineyard. It sounded like that although the men might have cultivated the vines with precious care, it was his late grandmother that ruled the roost with love and compassion.

  He concluded by mentioning that when his grandmother passed away her ashes were dispersed across a particular field just over yonder. And in fact from that very field grew the grapes…

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  Review by belial_carboni ★★★★½

  "When the wine flows, the terror begins..."

  The Grapes of Death is a stylish descent into madness. Rollin delivers his signature hypnotic surrealism yet this film feels a tad more polished and violent. The lofi gore is ramped up and the desolate countryside and cobblestone villages are a perfectly creepy setting. There's a thick cloud of artistic dread permeating from every eerie gust of wind and droney synth. That beheading is friggin nuts dang!!! This one's scary! They really got some solid mileage out of that head prop!

  There's an ethereal sleaziness in Rollins' films that's just so satisfying. Like being caught in some seductive nightmare that's equally terrifying and titillating! The whole concept of the poison grapes turning people…

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★½ 2

  Rollin's enviromentally-minded take on the zombie genre is one bizarro trip. Wine made from poisonous, pesticide-drenched grapes is the source of a strange outbreak among the villagers in a remote region of rural France. Passing through the infected area, Élisabeth and her friend are caught by L'homme du train and when her friend winds up as a bloody corpse on the bathroom floor, Élisabeth jumps the train and hightails it into the countryside. She soon finds herself on a desperate ramble through the sticks, playing a deadly game of dodge the decomposing. The disease mainly manifests itself as hideous pus-encrusted lesions and red + yellow secretions (many hot dogs were harmed in the making of this film), prefiguring rabid bloodlust.…

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  Review by Gentry ★★★★★ 2

  “I’m sick. Kill me. Help me.”

  If asked, pitchfork to the neck, this is my favorite Jean Rollin film. I almost feel guilty admitting that because it's definitely not one of his. What can I say? I just love the journey. It's a story that could easily be broken up into chapters, acts, or a series of comic books that Rollin loved so much:

  Prelude: The pesticide
  Act 1: The train (morning )
  Act 2: The farmhouse (day)
  Act 3: The ruins and the blind girl (dusk)
  Act 4: The village (night)
  Act 4A: The mayor’s house (night)
  Act 4B: The rescue (sunrise)
  Act 5: The road to Roublès (morning)
  Act 5A: Roublès (day)

  It’s October, Elizabeth is on the…