At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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.

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.

Les Raisins de la Mort, or The Grapes of Death as it's more commonly known to English speaking audiences, starts on a French vineyard called Roubles. One of the workers named Kowalski complains about feeling ill... Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) & her friend Brigitte are travelling across France on a train when it stops at a station & Kowalski gets on, he appears to have some sort of disease. He kills Brigitte & attacks Elizabeth who stops the train & flees in terror into the French countryside. Elizabeth comes across a house where she ask's for help, unfortunately the occupants are also infected with the sickness & it quickly becomes apparent that the mysterious infection has spread throughout the French countryside & Elizabeth must fight off the hordes of crazed villagers & find safety...This French production was co-written & directed by Jean Rollin & if you don't like his style of film-making then Les Raisins de la Mort will do little to change your opinion, it certainly hasn't changed mine. The script by Rollin & Christian Meunier seems to have been heavily influenced by Goerge A. Romeros The Crazies (1973), in fact they have much in common. It is also very slow, dull & frankly boring. It has a decent central premise that had potential but the film is just lethargic & the infected villagers themselves totally disappear for the final twenty odd minutes & they are just really slow. The story, character's or situations just didn't grip or engage me & I found myself becoming more & more disinterested in what was, or in the case of Les Raisins de la Mort, what wasn't happening.Director Rollin as usual spends more time on the visual look of the film rather than the story. There is hardly any dialogue which is expected & he likes to let his images to do the talking. Les Raisins de la Mort has a nice visual look, the bleak stark French countryside with it stone house village's makes for a nice isolated location although it does become monotonous eventually. Contray to what you may have heard the gore is quite tame & the special make-up effects are generally poor as the infected villager's look like they have bits of pizza stuck on their faces. There is one gory moment when someone has their head cut off with an axe, other than that there is a poor looking slit throat, someone is stabbed with a pitchfork & a few splashes of blood, that's it. For a Rollin film the nudity is surprisingly low with just two instances.Technically the film is OK, it looks nice enough but the effects are a bit dodgy looking. I can't comment on the acting as the dialogue is spoken in French, so don't watch it if you don't like reading subtitles as I don't think an English dub version exists.Les Raisins de la Mort was disappointing as far as I'm concerned, I'd have preferred a zombie film with intestine eating & blood drinking rather than the infected villager's type thing we ended up with. I found it boring, dull & went nowhere. Even Rollins usual visual dream like surreal style seems to be absent. Average at best, not worth making any real effort to watch.

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.