The Grapes of Death / The Night of the Hunted

Wine pairings are all the rage these days. Almost every upscale restaurant has a special night where you can discover how a Pinot Noir complements a roast duck or a Sauvignon Blanc brings out the flavor in some red snapper. But the most nagging question remains: what type of wine goes best with zombies?

The Grapes of Death (1978) doesn’t answer the question directly, but it does place the blame for the zombie apocalypse squarely on the shoulders of an isolated French vineyard whose chemical pesticides have seeped into the local supply of vino. The mass consumption causes local villagers to begin to rot inside and out, turning them into sickly, seeping maniacs. Our heroine, Elisabeth, is attacked on a train by a field hand and escapes into the countryside, only to find one infected town after another.

Directed by Jean Rollin – better known for his dreamy, erotic, Euro-vampire movies, The Grapes of Death is without a doubt his most accessible film. Probably because he’s working from the zombie template established in Night of the Living Dead and – maybe more influential locally – The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. There’s enough gore and nudity to satiate folks if that’s all they’re looking for. But Rollin’s zombies are just different enough to be interesting; they walk, talk and seem to feel guilty for all the trouble they’re causing. And the film’s atmosphere is (as Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas points out in the liner notes) genuinely creepy, something that Rollin didn’t accomplish very often in his career.

Grapes has a nightmare quality that one doesn’t usually associate with the zombie genre. The foggy landscapes and abandoned buildings make for a unique modern gothic that – if you can overlook some technical flaws – cast the undead in an entirely different light.

Night of the Hunted (1980) is a far less successful attempt by Rollin to have his cake and eat it too. Starring French adult film star Brigitte Lahaie (who pops up in The Grapes of Death as well) as Elysabeth, an amnesiac that’s picked up on the side of the road by a Good Samaritan…who promptly takes her home for a roll in the hay. But it seems Elysabeth has escaped from some sort of secret lab where people suffering from similar memory troubles are kept locked up in a secure facility. Her recapture and return to the lab introduces us to a whole gang of mentally challenged misfits while Rollin’s script dangles the mystery in front of us for 91 minutes.

With sex scenes shoehorned into the film to put butts in the seats (and pad the running time), it becomes obvious rather quickly that Night of the Hunted is a short film stretched well past its narrative limits. Lahaie isn’t a bad actress. Rollin makes the most of her and the general concept of cumulative memory loss, with patients actually forgetting how to eat, walk and button their clothes. In the end, however, it feels like a rushed production (shot in 8 days, actually) that forces you to take the good with the bad.

Each of the films is available separately on blu-ray from Kino Lorber under the Redemption label. Both transfers are mixed bag, with an unusual amount of wear and tear balanced by moments of amazing clarity. Grapes features an introduction by the director plus a 49-minute interview, trailers and 16-pages of liner notes. Hunted has those as well, along with a pair of deleted scenes.