Anna tends to head home to Brainerd, MN about once a month to visit her family. While I enjoy visiting her family, my job doesn’t afford the me the luxury of weekends off so I rarely can adjust my schedule to make these trips. And while I miss spending time with her on these weekends, I am afforded one small luxury. I get to watch movies for this site that she has absolutely no interest in.

Now, over the years we have both forced the other to watch movies that we knew the other didn’t want to watch. But in fairness to both of us, typically these are films that we were passionate about and simply wanted to share something we loved with the other person. Unfortunately, both of us have wildly different tastes. She is fiercely pretentious and very selective in what she will spend her time on. I am more of a buffet styled viewer, slopping anything and everything on the Netfix queue in the hopes I find a gem within the mountain of crap. She became a fan of Bill Murray after watching Lost in Translation, and refuses to watch any of his films previous to it. I am a fan of all Bill Murray films except Lost in Translation, because it sucks. She is a fan of Lars von Trier films like Dogville and Dancer in the Dark. I may have called her stupid for liking those movies. And so on and so forth.

But it isn’t like we have only forced each other to watch movies we will defend to the death. On occasion we have made each other watch truly awful movies. While I don’t like discussing the Transformers incident, it was hardly the worst movie I dragged Anna too, that just might be Mission Impossible 3. Even though I hadn’t seen the movie yet I foolishly bet her that she would like the movie. She bet me that when she didn’t like it that I would have to watch Magnolia, a film I had managed to avoid ever watching because I knew I would hate it. For the record, she hated MI-3 and I hated Magnolia.

Since then there have been other poorly planned moments. Even now she is trying desperately to tell me that she doesn’t want to watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua even though I know she secretly does. I may like plenty of crappy movies, but at least I have the guts to admit it. Good Lord I own Heartbeakers.

But while she loves to mock me for my many poor selections of films for us to watch, they all pale in comparison to a film she had me watch the other day called Passion in the Desert. It is about a French soldier (played by a man with a thick English accent) during Napoleon’s campaign in Africa. This British Frenchman is separated from his platoon and becomes hopelessly lost in the desert. Luckily he stumbles upon an oasis that could save his life, but this same oasis happens to be protected by a leopard. Luckily for him the leopard grows fond of him and allows him to share the oasis with her, and the soldier gradually falls in love with the leopard.

Now by fall in love with the leopard I do mean fall in love with the leopard. The soldier follows her everywhere, grooms her with his tongue, and when a male leopard comes to the oasis to get his groove on, the soldier becomes increasingly irrational; culminating in the soldier stripping naked, covering himself in black and yellow mud and pretending he is a leopard in the hopes he can win her back. In all honesty, this might be the worst movie I have ever seen. This is coming from someone who owns Heartbreakers.

Post screening Anna went into some serious damage control. Now claiming to have never liked the movie, she now states to having no recollection of the rampant bestiality throughout the film. No, she simply says she only remembers watching the movie as a child, and being fascinated by a man with an uncircumcised penis. That is how bad Passion in the Dessert is. That an ardent fan would back pedal so much that rather then be known as someone who liked the movie, they would rather be branded a pervert by making the claim they simply wanted to see some unbridled male genitalia. How sick is that?

So now after three years of torturing each other we have finally learned when it is best to leave well enough alone and not force the other to watch something they are bound to not like, or even worse, might embarrass us for initially recommending it. Leaving me with one weekend a month to watch a film, that while it may contain killer wine and talking zombies, probably won’t be any good.

Now it is true that The Grapes of Death is a zombie movie, which would lead one to believe should be pretty good, no matter how bad it is. But see, this isn’t just any zombie movie. This is a French zombie movie. See? That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence does it? When it comes to zombie films, it usually is a wise decision to not stray from either the US or Italy when it comes to them. For whatever reason both countries seem to know just how to make a proper zombie film. Sure there are plenty of duds, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a quality zombie flick outside either of their borders.

Not helping matters is the fact that The Grapes of Death is not only French’ s first ever gore film, but it also happens to be directed by Jean Rollin, a man who would later go on to direct porn films. Granted, splatter films being made by directors of dubious merit is far from a deal breaker, but this is a French splatter film. Which is practically an oxymoron.

But The Grapes of Death had more then a few surprises up its gory sleeve. First up was an outstanding opening scene that was pitch perfect in its subtle delivery. What starts as a shot of several men walking through the fields after they have finished spraying pesticides on the vines, slowly turns its focus onto the driver of a tractor as he struggles to breath through the fumes. Slowly dropping its score as the camera zooms in on the driver’s mask shielded face, slowly but surely all that one can hear is the driver’s belabored breathing until the image freezes and the title card flashes on screen. It is a fantastic opening to the film, and with that sequence The Grapes of Death already had exceeded my meager expectations.

But The Grapes of Death had more in store for me. The soundtrack, which is a simplistic synth score reminiscent of Tangerine Dream, fits the mood of the film to perfection. Much like in the opening scene, the score drifts in and out of the film time and again, adding subtle dreadful lowlights time and again. The Grapes of Death isn’t so much a horrific film as it is dreadfully creepy, almost overwhelmingly so.

The other outstanding feature of The Grapes of Death is the cinematography, which is often times jaw droppingly beautiful. Shot in the beautiful rolling hills along the coasts of France, it would be difficult for the film to look anything but beautiful. That being said, cinematographer Claude Becognee really does his best to show off the area as well as one could possibly imagine, and The Grapes of Death only profits because of it. The most impressive shot among many is a beautiful long take of Elisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) running across a fog covered bridge that is truly hauntingly beautiful.

But, unfortunately, The Grapes of Death does have areas that it struggles to overcome. The first is the gore effects are incredibly hit or miss. The zombies are supposed to be covered by bloody pustules, but when they burst look nothing like blood. The color mix is often horribly off, with orange, yellow and even occasionally blue showing up amongst the gore. But while the fake blood is an obvious weakness, the film does have one sequence that will make you question how they pulled it off. And that isn’t even including a decapitation sequence that will boggle your mind even today.

The other area where The Grapes of Death really suffers is its story, which is barely linear and often times seems made up on the spot to try and connect one set piece to the next. The film isn’t designed with a strong narrative in mind, relying more on its impressive visuals and visceral shocks to keep audiences interested rather then character development or, you know, a plot. For some simply soaking up the ambiance will be enough, but for me this lack of story is the key reason why The Grapes of Death is merely a good movie, rather then a great movie.

The opening of the third act is where the complete lack of narrative becomes painfully evident. Maria, having horrifically lost her previous traveling companion only moments earlier, Maria is chased by a horde of zombies when she is seemingly rescued by a beautiful woman (Brigitte Lahaie) with a smile like a Cheshire Cat. The film, which had just started to crank it up a notch comes to a screeching halt as Rollin attempts to find any reason to have Lahaie saunter around on screen. In the span of 10 minutes she has 4 costume changes and somehow manages to magically wrangle up two Great Danes to roam the countryside with. All so Rollin can toss in a shameless nude shot of her.

Thankfully, once Rollin has found an excuse to have his muse bare it all for the camera he finds a way to get the film back on track by introducing two beer drinking heroes who save Elisabeth from the zombie horde and the poisoned wine before heading off to try and find Elisabeth’s fiancée, who just so happens to be the man responsible for this gigantic clusterf*ck.

But here I am seventeen hundred words in and I’ve barely mentioned one of the more unique aspects of the film, that of its talking zombies. Unlike your standard flesh eating zombie, The Grapes of Death imparts a slight twist on the archetype. These zombies are still killing machines, yet they do not do it out of any desire to feed on flesh. Rather they still retain a sliver of their humanity, often resulting in their unspeakable acts even more horrible to the audience watching their bloody compulsions. They are pained by their actions, yet are unable to resist them. This horror at what they have become is routinely expressed vocally, making these zombies far more tragic figures then anything George Romero has been able to accomplish. It is a fascinating and disturbing take on the genre, and a most welcome addition.

But thankfully I didn’t make Anna sit through it. I have no doubt that she would have hated it.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 10:52 am and is filed under Features, Foreign Films, Movies, Reviews, Where the Long Tail Ends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.