This week for our look at a featured Letterboxd List we turn to the horror genre. From the They Shoot Zombies, Don’t They? – The 1,000 Greatest Horror Films (2025 Edition) list comes The Grapes of Death.
Title: The Grapes of Death
Director: Jean Rollin
Released: July 5, 1978 (Theatrical – France)
Runtime: 1 hour 31 minutes
Workers spray pesticide over grape vines in the French countryside. One of them, Kowalski, says he feels sick. His boss brushes him off and tells him to get back to work. Kowalski scratches at his neck and gets back to work.
Meanwhile, two women are on a train, one is traveling to Spain while the other is headed for Roubles. At a station stop, Kowalski boards the train and finds his way to their car. There’s now a growth spreading across his face. Elisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), the one headed for Roubles, finds her friend Brigitte dead in the next compartment. She pulls the emergency brake and exits the train, running into the countryside. She continues running until she reaches a farmhouse.
Inside, a man and woman blankly stare at her. The man instructs the woman, Antoinette, to seat Elisabeth at the table. Elisabeth asks to use the phone and the car parked out front. The man says they don’t have a phone that works and that the car’s broken. She notices the same marks on his hand that were on Kowalski’s face. She tries to leave but Antoinette slaps her, stops her, and tells her this is where she lives now, before sending her upstairs so she can settle in.
Upstairs there’s a dead woman in the bed. Antoinette begs for help, saying that its her mother and the man downstairs killed her. The man bursts in and after a tussle it’s revealed that Antoinette has the infection too. In order to save her from suffering, the man impales her with a pitchfork. Elisabeth escapes in the fully functional car sitting out front.
She drives to some ruins where another infected man attacks. She shoots him at point-blank range. A blind woman, Lucie, appears and offers to lead Elisabeth to a village. As they approach, it is eerily quiet and the village winds up being abandoned. Even worse, it’s clear what happened to everyone as their bodies are strewn out across the village. Elisabeth tries to tell Lucie that they aren’t there yet but Lucie can sense they’re in the village and demands to know where everyone is.
Then the dead begin to return. All of them. Grape zombies.
The practical effects here hold up surprisingly well. The rotten grape zombie design is a fun twist on the standard undead, and the French countryside sells the isolation early on. Fifteen minutes in and there’s tension. What’s going on with Kowalski’s face? Why is he chasing after Elisabeth? It plays like a thriller, maybe a thriller with some horror mixed in, but thirty minutes in I’d be hard pressed to call this a horror movie.
A third of the way through and we still don’t know anything about the infection. Halfway in and there are more questions than answers.
Turns out it’s a wine village and the only people not infected are the ones who stayed away from the grapes and didn’t drink the wine. Makes sense when you see it since the wounds look like rotten grapes. There are even a few instances where the blood actually looks like grape juice.
Jean Rollin takes his time with that reveal and once he does, there’s barely twenty minutes left to wrap everything up. It felt like it was stalling for a sequel before hurriedly committing to an ending.
My biggest gripes are that the pacing drags and Elisabeth doesn’t give us much to hold onto. We know she’s trying to reach Roubles where her fiancé is waiting but that’s about it. There’s no real reason to care whether she makes it or not.
Overall, it’s slow when it needs to move and rushed when it needs to land.
For a movie that made a “1,000 films” list, I can see it earning a spot on there. Just not sure I’d go back to it.
If you’ve seen The Grapes of Death, was the juice worth the squeeze for you?