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 Friends go on a vacation and things go wrong when one of them "flees from a
train, only
to stumble into a remote village overtaken by its zombie-like inhabitants."
The villagers slowly turn into "violent, decomposing killers" and the "local
winery" may be to blame. The pesticide used on the grapes might do "more than
just kill insects..." They credit director Jean Rollin with being in "top form"
and also claim that he is "one of the most honored directors of all
time." 1978, 90 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
Jean Rollin, best known for his lesbian vampire abominations, detours into
zombie territory with this film that appears to be more of a knock-off of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie than of George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, though Let Sleeping Corpses Lie ripped that one off itself, so I don't suppose it matters a whole lot. Rollin
transplants his zombie opus to the French countryside and if this is how France
really looks, I think I'll stick to my vacations in Des Moines. It's kind of
rocky and ugly and sometimes it's foggy and generally looks like some kind of
place that an inbred kid with a banjo would play, but without the scenic river
geography. The countryside is dotted with villages that haven't changed for
the billion years they've been there. The homes are made of stone and you half
expect to see Beowulf come crashing into the pub demanding to know where
Grendel is hiding. Except that these villages don't seem to have any pubs,
inns or any businesses at all for that matter. Just a series of stone
buildings that zombies come in and out of periodically. At least Let Sleeping Corpses Lie made good use of the English countryside (idyllic except for the guys trying
to take a chunk out of your arm). Despite the generally grubby appearance of
things here, I was pleasantly surprised that this wasn't as putrid as the sores
on most of the people in this film and Jean seemed to stay focused enough that
it didn't turn into the confusing mess most of his work seems to be (at least
that's how
the write ups on the Redemption DVDs sound - if the people in charge of
selling you the DVD can't write anything that makes the movie sound good, I
ain't about to put twenty-five bucks on the line for a guy named Jean).
There's not a lot of new ground plowed here or anything (most of the changes
are strictly cosmetic and done to keep Jeannie from getting his arse sued), but
the movie keeps moving along and enough happens that I only put it on pause to
excrete one time (conversely, I took bathroom breaks rather frequently during Organ).  Things start out innocently enough at a vineyard somewhere in France where
workers are spraying some new-fangled pesticide (it's new-fangled in the sense
that it causes people that drink the wine made from the grapes to rot and want
to kill each other - sounds like just the thing France needs) on the grapes.
One of the workers has trouble breathing, even though he is wearing a mask, but
the boss brushes it off. Probably some type of worker's compensation fraud
going on. You know how those union guys are. Then we go to a train where
Elizabeth and her friend are chugging along to different destinations.
Elizabeth is headed to this very vineyard where all the lazy workers are trying
to go on disability (the whole "violent rotting zombie" gimmick only hinders
your interpersonal communication skills, not whether you can jump around in a
vat of grapes) because her fiancee Michael is there (you can bet that's
pronounced "Michelle"). Her friend is going to someplace like Spain. No one
else is on the train because it's in the middle of October and everyone knows
that from September through March the country of France is shut down for the
winter while they all lie in bed and drink wine and complain about the creeping
Americanization (enjoy your Big Mac, Frenchie!) of their country. This is
opposed to the time spent under the
bed drinking wine whenever a foreign army farts in their general direction.
The gals have the run of the train and it's a glorious day until this dude
materializes and decides that he's going to sit right next to Elizabeth.
There's nobody else on the train, but this guy looks like Ringo Starr, circa
1968, so I don't know what she has to complain about. She tries to ignore this
dude, but can't help noticing that he keeps picking at his neck. Soon, his
gaping sore is plainly visible and it spreads (after some convenient reaction
shots by Liz - gotta get the next bit of goo glued onto his neck you know). I
think Miss Manners would agree with me that in situations like this, the proper
thing to do if one sees someone rotting is to discretely alert them to that
fact by making a wiping motion with the hand in the area where the offending
glop
is hanging, as if to let them know that there is food on their face or in this
case part of their head on their face. Instead of doing this however,
Elizabeth runs screaming out of the train car. You know how those French
people are about manners.  Liz runs through the train and discovers that her friend will not be making it
to running of the bulls after all. She pulls a handle in one of the train
cars, stops the train, and gets off. I don't know much about trains, but is it
necessarily a good idea to have some gizmo that lets passengers stop the thing
whenever they need a pit stop? Does anyone else think that this probably
wouldn't work too well here in the States? She gets off the train and runs
away into the countryside. The zombie looks around and finally sits down and
hangs his head. This is the first time in a zombie movie that I've seen one of
them get depressed when a victim got away. Elizabeth ends up at some rural
farm house (actually more of a stone hut) and encounters a man and woman there.
The man has a nasty sore on his hand (doesn't mean he's a zombie, could just
be meth) and he covers it up when he notices that she sees it. The woman turns
out to be this guy's daughter and tells Liz that her dad is afflicted with the
zombie rot and that he won't let her leave. Liz and her new best friend plot
their escape, but are hampered when the old man gets up to pee or something
(you know those old people and their cranky bladders). He gets mad that she's
leaving and rips his daughter's shirt off and I'm thinking, "whoa, is this
France or Arkansas", but instead of just being a regular old pervert, he was
merely pointing out that she had some sores, too. Then just to make sure she
gets the point (hehehe) he stabs her with a pitchfork and you get a nice,
loving look at her impaled on the kitchen table with it. If I were that guy, I
would probably just start using a TV tray for my meals in the future. Liz
decides that it would be unseemly for her to remain when it is so obvious that
there are some family disputes that these two need to work out, so she runs
outside and gets in the dude's car. He gets out there and begs her to kill
him. Being a good citizen, she runs that sucker over. The car
breaks down at some point and she meets up with a zombie that is just beginning
to rot. He wants a ride to bingo or somewhere and when she demures he bangs
his head on the car until his icky gunk is all over and the window breaks. Liz
decides that she could use some more exercise and abandons the car, running
away into the countryside yet again. 
Next up on Liz's fabulous French vacation is her encounter with a blind girl.
Some blind chick is out wondering around in the wilderness and says she got
lost from her guide when everyone in the village went crazy and starting
killing each other. She asks Liz what it looks like where they're at and Liz
tells her that there's lots of rocks. Since this woman is blind, all her other
senses have become like superpowers and she immediately recognizes where they
are at and manages to lead Liz back to her village where there's a bunch of
zombies (thanks Blind Girl!). Blind Girl manages to hook back up with her
guide pal, but he's changed a bit since they last knew one another (about an
hour before). Where he used to be all about helping her out and showing her
where the general store was, now he's all about, strangling, stripping, and
crucifying her. Jean pulls out the stops for us by having her nailed up to
this guy's door and then having him chop her head off (he carries it around
with him the rest of the movie, like a lucky rabbit's foot). Blood spurts
judiciously and you admire that Jean Rollin has papered over the fact that this
is basically a long chase-type movie, without anything substantive occurring by
having periodic sequences of gore, sufficient in quantity to keep you from
getting too irate at this film for its uninspired stupidity. Liz finds refuge
in a fancy house that looks like it would be more at home in one of Dario
Argento's seventies slasher flicks, then in the nasty French countryside.
There's lights and stuffed animals, and a sex-ay blonde who just happens to be
hanging out there. She explains to Liz that this is the mayor's house and she
looks after the place and is just crashing there until this zombie thing blows
over. This doesn't seem to make all that much sense, because the zombies kind
of bang on the windows and doors, but can't get in. Normally this would be
acceptable in a zombie flick, but here the zombies still retain their human
thoughts for at least awhile since they realize they're rotting and some of
them want to be killed. I don't get why they just didn't bust in, but it turns
out that this woman is some kind of zombie herself and double crosses Liz and
sics the rest of the village on her. Not sure why they didn't turn on this
blonde girl. Because she told them she was one of them? Why believe that?
Maybe Liz could just tell, "hey don't bother trying to take a bite out of my
butt, I already gave at the office." This nebulousness in how the zombies are
defined gives the movie a sense that it was being made up as it went along,
with zombies behaving any old way they wanted depending on the needs of the
plot. Liz is rescued by two guys and the blonde girl blows herself up with some
dynamite that those guys were carting around. The guys and Liz decide to walk
to the winery where her boyfriend works creating pesticides that turn people
into homicidal maniacs. Along the way they stop and talk about how nice it
would be to have a beer. You and I would probably think that that was a fairly
insignificant conversation, but Jean uses it to somehow have the characters
realize that the wine must have been poisoned and caused everyone to become
these whacked out freaks. It is of course totally unbelievable, as is the
later conversation about fascists, the resistance and how one guy thinks they
should try and help the zombies instead of shooting them. That must have been
Jean's effort to shoehorn in some weak political commentary in about the
mindless masses and that they should be given a voice instead of trampled by
the government. The conversation feels as out of place in the movie as it
sounds reading about it. This comes pretty soon after the big revelation about
the wine and beer and gives the movie a real hokey feeling it had pretty much
managed to avoid up until then. Things wind up at the winery with some fairly
pedestrian action involving some people getting shot. Rollin shoots his movie
without any discernable style. People run around, there are some gore scenes,
and people run around some more. It isn't that it is poorly shot, it's just
that it doesn't have any particular look or feel to it, like a Romero or a
Fulci movie. Fulci shows us that it is possible to be derivative, but still
evoke some sense of individuality in presentation. As noted earlier, what the
zombies actually are, is never really explained in any depth and they don't
seem to
possess any common desires amongst themselves (some are violent, some want to
die, some don't show any visible effects). The pro-environment angle is
present by inference, but is never explored beyond the fact that someone made a
pesticide and it caused a little problemo. I don't recall whether Let Sleeping Corpses Lie explored their eco/zombie stuff anymore than that, but at least they did it
first. If you're going to copy something, try to expand it, give it your own
spin, or somehow make it worth the audience's while to sit through it (again).
Is it
worth sitting through? For zombie fans, I would have to slot it below Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (it was better looking and had more action) and above Burial Ground (I'm still looking for one to slot below this one). If you've seen the major
zombie films available on DVD and you're ready to dive into the morass of
secondary efforts, this is as good a place to start as any.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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