I have a rule that if I can not remember the last time I watched one of my favorite films, then it's obviously time for a revisit. When going through some of our foreign DVDs, looking for something to watch, I came across The Grapes of Death and the feeling that came over me, you would have thought I spotted an old flame amidst a sea of possibilities. I couldn't resist the urge to pick it up and watch it, for old times sake.

I think the power Jean Rollin has over me is visceral. As soon as I hear the music on the menu screen, I am transfixed and I have a physical reaction, a favorite movie shouldn't just…

With its spurts of red blood, its green-yellow sores, and its purple clad heroine, Jean Rollin paints with the colors of a vineyard in "The Grapes of Death." A French horror film that finds zombie-esque masses roaming the French countryside, Rollin eschews his typical gauzy aesthetic and nonexistent pacing for a forward moving, quietly colorful, and mostly engaging genre outing.

The story revolves around a young woman who finds herself alone in a village peopled with the murderous near-dead. Escaping one perilous scrape after another, she teams up with two men to find safety. The narrative combines a typical zombie plotline with threads of a spreading epidemic and environmental themes. It is a compelling, somewhat layered tale.

Rollin's token stillness…

Coming home from the Languedoc region of southern France to the flat and completely "improved" landscape of the Netherlands is a little depressing, so we thought we'd hold onto the feeling a little with a revisit to a film featuring the countryside we were just enjoying. I had forgotten just how good a film it is - due in no small part to Rollin's excellent use of that amazing landscape, full of ruined stone buildings at various points of the journey, slowly returning to the rocky ground that they look to have sprung from. The performances are also top-notch, with Brigitte Lahaie showing that she's more than just a great body. There's even some clever teasing around the subject of…

Part of Hell On Earth: Horror Around The World, a 30 Days 30 Countries challenge.

Eighth stop: France

Where has this film been all my life? In fact, where has director Jean Rollin been all my life? The Grapes Of Death is my introduction to the man's work, and for sure I will be seeking out everything else he has done.

Made in 1978, before that other zombie film, which until today has never had anything close to an equal in my book, The Grapes Of Death benefits from being that rarest of zombie films that cannot be viewed through the influential filter of Romero's classic. Notable as one of France's first gore films, Rollin's direction lends it a remarkable…

Dan's Hoop-Toper 4.0

Progress: 10/40

Task: 6 countries (1/6)

A young lady is en route on a train to see her boyfriend at a French vineyard when a zombie-like man boards the train and kills her friend. She escapes but has no idea where she is and has to try to find help in what appears to be an extremely rural part of France.

I was very underwhelmed by this one and definitely disappointed, as it seems to have a pretty good cult following, but I guess I won't love every film like that. The story is interesting - people being turned into zombies by pesticides! A nice eco-horror touch for sure. But the execution was not there for me.…

”You’re rotting, just like me.”

The surreal and dreamlike approach to filmmaking taken by Jean Rollin takes another walk into the realm of the dead but instead of vampires, here we have murderous, zombie like denizens of doom.
Upon fleeing a maniac with a rotting race who has just killed her friend while aboard a train as she travels to the countryside to visit her fiancé at his vineyard Elisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), runs into a dark tunnel, crosses the mist shrouded bridge and wanders into a type of personal hell, complete with villagers who have consumed pesticide poisoned wine and are now out for blood.
Using the rocky mountainous Massif Central region as a backdrop to give the film an…

The set-up is simple. A young woman wanders into a fog-shrouded country village, searching for her lost fiancé. Instead, she finds the the townsfolk rotting (the makeup unconvincing but nonetheless effective), the few remaining with any conscious thought having turned into murderers.

The set up is simple, but Director Jean Rollin's approach is not. Where my last encounter with Rollin (Fascination) left me feeling a bit cold, his Grapes of Death snapped his style into place. Jean Rollin is not a horror director. Even at his most grotesque, like in the sequence in which a blind woman is crucified before getting decapitated, he invests his works with a dreamlike melancholy. You get the sense that he's searching for something with…