Month: March 2017

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Grapes of Death

Jean Rollin is at it again! Instead of yet another cinematic masterpiece featuring female vampires, he serves up a zombie movie. I’m not sure if Grapes of Death is the definitive French zombie movie of the 70’s because I know nothing about French cinema, but it should be in the running. Although no lady bloodsuckers appear in Grapes of Death, Rollin’s obsession with uncovering the Platonic pair of female breasts remains.

The plot: if you watch the above trailer you will see most of the highlights. If you do, there’s not much reason to watch the movie, which would be a shame. Elizabeth is traveling by train to Roubles to meet her fiancée, who works at a vineyard. A man with pustulant sores on his neck enters the train and attacks her. She escapes and spends the next 80+ minutes wandering the French countryside, leading to many nice shots of the landscape.

Elizabeth’s first stop: a farmhouse inhabited by a farmer and his adult daughter. The farmer has sores on his hands. Mom’s indisposed, her throat slashed ear to ear. Dad kills his daughter, ripping open her blouse to reveal the sore on her chest and then finishing her off with a pitchfork. Elizabeth flees in the farmer’s car but then stops for reasons I’m not smart enough to understand.

She meets a blind woman named Lucy who is lost. They return to the blind woman’s village, where everyone seems to be dead, but Elizabeth insists on telling her everything’s fine. Lucy isn’t stupid, and flees Elizabeth as soon as she can. Big mistake. Come night, the infected – or zombies – or drunken French people – rise up, lurching through the village. This leads to Lucy’s reunion with her infected lover, which is the highlight of Grapes of Death. Elizabeth soon makes another friend, the scythe-wielding woman from Fascination, and they have a decent catfight before a pair of gun-wielding peasants show up and spoil the fun. They flee to the Roubles vineyard and a genuinely ambiguous ending. Phew, that’s a lot of plot.

I am going to assume George Romero’s Dead duology and The Crazies influenced Grapes of Death – sort of. American zombies movies in the 70’s weren’t interested in things like sex, unless you count Dave Cronenberg up in Canada. They were mostly about showing the hair on the wall. Jean Rollin has a different aesthetic – The Grapes of Death has plenty of gore, but doesn’t skimp on the torn blouses, bare breasts and nudity. I will be kind and say that the makeup in this movie is mediocre. The sores are okay, but most of the effects are quite cheesy, which makes sense since cheese and wine go so well together!

A must-see for Jean Rollin fans!

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Let the Right One In

A traditional vampire tale with a twist, Let the Right One In is one of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen. I missed this flick when it came out in 2008. Long story short, I’m a decade behind. Let the Right One In is a Swedish movie with English subtitles. It’s available on Shudder.

The plot: twelve-year old Oskar has problems. His mom works a lot and his dad is absent, both physically and emotionally. A trio of bullies make Oskar’s life a living Hell. At the movie’s start he has serious anger issues, jabbing his knife into trees and keeping a murder notebook. Oskar’s life changes when the girl and her father move into his apartment complex. The girl’s name is Eli, which means ‘my god,’ and she and Oskar become fast friends. Oskar develops a crush on Eli, but his desire to go steady is hampered by the fact that Eli isn’t a real twelve-year old girl. She also isn’t human.

Eli is a vampire who needs human blood to survive and doesn’t waste time with any ‘I only kill bad people’ nonsense. She sends out her familiar, an older man named Hakan, to supply the hemoglobin. When Hakan turns out to be an incompetent murderer Eli has to do the job herself. Eli is a capable killer – at one point snapping an adult man’s neck – but doesn’t like killing.

At Eli’s urging, Oskar stands up to the bullies. He also finds out what Eli is, because that’s not the sort of thing you can hide. Oskar accepts Eli, because Eli is Oskar’s only friend, and Eli is always gentle and kind with him. Still, the trail of bodies grows longer, and they all lead to Eli.

Oskar and Eli are the most sympathetic characters in Let the Right One In. However, Eli does kill seven people, a body count that surprised me. There is a lot of subtext – obvious and hidden – in this movie. Does Eli want a friend or a new keeper? I don’t know, but the stick Oskar uses to defend himself from the bullies is the same stick Hakan uses to hide the body of one of Eli’s kills.

Highly recommended!