Grapes Of Death (4 Stars)

"Grapes of Death" is Jean Rollin's tenth film, made in 1978. It's the film where Rollin finally stopped drifting through graveyards full of melancholy vampires and decided to make a proper gore film. The result is strange, uneven and occasionally repulsive; but it's also one of the most fascinating entries in his career precisely because it feels like Rollin wrestling against his own instincts.

Most of Rollin's films move like dreams. Stories barely matter. Characters wander through ruined castles, deserted beaches and cemeteries as if sleepwalking through somebody else's fantasy. Dialogue is sparse, the pacing is hypnotically slow and violence often feels secondary to atmosphere. Even when blood appears in films like "Requiem for a Vampire" or "The Nude Vampire", it rarely has much physical weight. Rollin was usually more interested in lonely women, surreal imagery and erotic melancholy than shock.

"The Grapes of Death" is different from its opening scene. The countryside here isn't mystical; it's diseased. A pesticide sprayed on vineyards has transformed local workers into rotting homicidal maniacs, creating something halfway between a zombie film and a rural plague nightmare. Rollin borrows openly from contemporary exploitation horror, particularly the splatter films emerging in Italy at the time. Faces split open, flesh peels away and bodies are mutilated with a level of nastiness almost absent from his earlier work.

Yet even while embracing gore, Rollin cannot entirely stop being himself. The film still contains stretches of eerie silence and bizarre encounters that feel disconnected from ordinary narrative logic. The heroine Elisabeth wanders from one pocket of madness to another, meeting traumatised survivors who seem trapped in their own isolated worlds. The atmosphere remains dreamlike even when the special effects become graphic. Rollin turns the French countryside into a place of decay and loneliness rather than pure terror.

What really separates the film from his earlier work is its anger. Rollin's vampire films are sad and romantic; "The Grapes of Death" feels bitter. The poisoned vineyards create an unmistakably environmental horror story, reflecting fears about industrial contamination and modern agriculture. The violence has a grimy physicality that strips away the fairy-tale quality usually found in his cinema. This is probably the closest Rollin ever came to making a conventional horror film for mainstream exploitation audiences.

The irony is that even here he could not fully conform. Beneath the gore and infected flesh lies the same lonely poetic sensibility that defined all his work. The film is rougher, harsher and bloodier than his usual output; but it still belongs unmistakably to Rollin. Nobody else would make a zombie film that pauses so often for melancholy, silence and strange beauty.