I've had this film in my collection for yonks, so I thought I'd get round to watching. Please note, I like my euro films loud and quick and full of gore, and although this film had gore, the loud and quick parts were sadly lacking. PLOT? Wine = being a zombie. That's that. There's this French chick trying to get to her fiancé and basically we're here to watch her try and get there, and the outcome of what happens there, like. But you're a busy person. You don't want the f*ckin plot, because you know it already. You're question is, is it any good.Answer: Kind of. It's nowhere near as horrible as Zombie Lake, and does contain moments of greatness, but there's an awful lot of places in the film where everything slows to a crawl just because our heroine is very slow on the uptake. I paid three pound for it. It was worth it. I think I paid 11 pound for zombie Lake, and have been unable to stay awake through it long enough to review it.

The zombie flick starts off promisingly, with an incredibly dumb brunette abandoning a train after her friend had been murdered by a confused, slowly decomposing semi-zombie. Mind you, when I say that GOD starts promisingly, I don't mean that in a "Blade Runner" promising kind of way, but more in a decent-zombie-B-flick promising manner. However, GOD starts sinking rapidly with the appearance of Brigitte Lahaie. Don't get me wrong, it's not her fault; she gives us a splendid view of her perfect body and boobs, just minutes before being blown into bits. It's the fault of the damn script, which quickly disintegrates into bull's dung from this point onwards. Lahaie plays an uninfected villager who – somehow and for whatever bizarre/idiotic reason – acts as Svengali to the zombies around her. She helps them snatch and kill the uninfected, rather than abandon the village. There is absolutely no explanation for this; it's merely a dumb plot-device to prolong the movie or to make it forcibly unpredictable. Nor is it explained why the zombies don't want to kill her and obey her. The brunette is incredibly stupid, possibly the most dim-witted and confused movie heroine I've ever seen. One of her many foolish decisions was to refuse to tell the blind girl about the danger – as if making the girl think she is not surrounded by the living grape-dead actually makes her safe. Predictably and logically, the blind girl is appalled and confused by the lies and runs away and is murdered. Beheaded, no less; there's the French for ya, saving the most sadistic demise for a helpless invalid dyevochka. Her end is a direct result of the dumb brunette's idiotic decision-making process which dominates GOD. It's just part of a string of dumb decisions and actions she makes. A little later, the dumb brunette meets Lahaie who requests to hold the brunette's revolver only minutes after they'd met; typically for our bird-brained brunette heroine, she suspects nothing, even turning her back to Lahaie so that the chesty blond can attack her with more ease.Just minutes after she'd been betrayed by Lahaie, the awfully dumb brunette approaches her, carrying a torch. To get her revenge? To prevent another attack? Not really. Instead of attacking her, the brunette just stares at Lahaie – as if she were a dumb zombie herself; Lahaie predictably takes advantage of the situation and pounces on her. Duh. Lahaie's character is so absurd, she even has an unintentionally funny moment when she tells the two armed villagers that she "didn't hear anything" right after the dumb brunette lets out a very loud scream nearby. The two dolts predictably don't suspect anything, never questioning why she'd lie about it.GOD then even manages to contradict itself when the brunette describes the peasant's daughter as "crazy" in spite of having "only a small sore". That's the same peasant's daughter who tried to SAVE the dumb brunette from her own father and got killed in the process: she wasn't crazy at all. That's the thanks you get for trying to save a Frenchwoman! (But isn't it such a typical trait of the French to confuse sanity with insanity?) The dumb brunette shows yet more "gratefulness" (or grapefulness?) a little later when she murders two unarmed uninfected men – the same men who had come to her rescue so selflessly just a day earlier! And she is supposed to be GOD's heroine! We're supposed to root for this illogical female moron. But it's things like these that make a French movie so French; they have such a skewered sense of morality, bless 'em; it's almost comical at times. The dumb brunette actually suggests to the armed men that they go to her fiancé's wine-brewery right after they'd concluded that grapes are the culprit! That's like traveling to the Arctic just as scientists announce that a new Ice Age had started. On their way there, the trio engages in a moronic political discussion in which the military and nuclear power-plants are named as the enemy of man and society – i.e. the writer's pet-peeves. No scene is too silly for those left-wingers to advance their cretinous propaganda with; no opportunity or situation, no matter how unsuitable or daft, is missed out to harass viewers with their fanatical, logic-free ideology. Strangely enough, it turns out that it wasn't nuclear waste that turned the normally happy-to-please grapes into sour grapes of death, but her fiancé's experimental pesticide. When "The Simpsons" plays around with these kinds of dumb left-wing fantasies at least we can laugh WITH it, because it's a comedic cartoon. But GOD we laugh AT, because the film-makers try to lend "socio-political/environmental relevance" to a goofy little zombie movie. God knows George Romero had tried this and failed, time and time again, the Marxist putz. You can't preach while standing on your head. You can't preach while taking a dump. And you certainly can't preach in a zombie movie. There is a time and place for empty-headed preaching, and these three situations just aren't it.Film buffs – nearly all incurable Marxists - like to describe GOD and other movies like it as "subversive". They must mean "idiotic". But then again, they DO get awfully confused.The script is a mess in every sense of the word. So badly written is this "zombie message movie" that GOD manages to unintentionally turn its politically-correct heroes into villains and morons, while turning the supposedly narrow-minded trigger-happy hick into the voice of reason. How had they achieved this? By having the dumb brunette murder her rescuers, the writer inadvertently turns the gun-happy old geezer into the hero and smart guy, because it turns out he'd been right all along about killing everybody. This, in turn, renders his left-wing-thinking young buddy wrong/stupid because he proposed a softer approach to the zombies. Wow.

I must admit that, unlike many of my fellow Eurohorror fanatics, I am not the biggest fan of Jean Rollin, but then, I am still far from being an expert on the man's work. Most of the Rollin films that I've seen so far reach from stylish but flawed (e.g. "Fascination") to stylish but boring (e. g. "La Rose De Fer") to plain ridiculous ("Le Lac Des Morts Vivants"). Therefore, I was very positively surprised when I recently saw "Les Raisins De La Mort" aka. "The Grapes of Death" (1977) a highly original, creepy, intelligent and overall very impressive Zombie/Gore film, which is by far my favorite of all the Rollin flicks I've seen. "Les Raisins De La Mort" is a Zombie film with a somewhat environmentalist premise: In a mountainous, wine-drinking area of France, pesticides that are meant as insect repellents for grapes, turn the population sick and murderously insane... Unlike your usual fully braindead zombies, the infected here are still (somewhat) capable of thinking, talking and having feelings, they just have the insatiable urge to murder... "Les Raisins De La Mort" has the reputation of being one of the first French gore films, and it is also a highly effective one. The cinematography and settings (beautiful French landscapes and villages) are extremely elegant, which is a quality that most Rollin films have. This one's intriguing premise and suspense is a quality that I would only attribute to this one (out of the bunch of Rollin films I've seen). Marie-Georges Pascal, who sadly committed suicide at age 39 in 1985, makes a likable protagonist as Élisabeth, a girl who gets lost in the land of the infested when trying to visit her fiancé, and Mirella Rancelot is memorable as a blind girl, a likable character whose stare into nonentity is both sympathy-evoking and slightly eerie. The film delivers what gore fans expect, the zombie-makeup (the infested begin to get moldy and rot away) is extremely disgusting, and the gore effects are bloody as hell and very well done. For a Rollin film, this one is very low on the sleaze and nudity, only the ravishing actress/pornstar Brigitte Lahaie (Rollin's favorite actress) gets naked in a supporting role. The score is pretty good and underlines the eerie atmosphere.Overall, this film delivers everything one might hope for in a Zombie film: a nice setting, suspense and creepiness, and loads of (both disturbing and disgusting) gore. Atmospheric, effective and definitely Rollin's best, in my opinion. Highly recommended!

I just saw this Synapse DVD last night and enjoyed it quite a bit, but I have to add a different perspective on the decapitation scene that everyone seems to enjoy. The most shocking and significant part of the scene is the crucifixion, but the head-chopping itself . . . well, it's about as believable as Herschell Gordon Lewis. It's one of those things where a limp, soft, human actress instantly turns into a stiff wooden or plastic mannequin coated with paint. You can even hear the wooden chunk of the hatchet going through! You can only laugh. And the editing of that scene looks like a hatchet was used there too. It's like the director or producer thought he needed a "money shot." That's the most unconvincing moment in the movie, the low point of an otherwise pretty decent, paranoid, nicely photographed nightmare with character touches and subversive elements.By the way, my favorite element is the fact that the baddies aren't real "living dead" zombies and they don't want to eat the living. They're just people with a disease that drives them mad, but they can be killed in any ordinary way and they don't get up again. That makes it a bit more like "The Crazies" or "Rabid" or "Blue Sunshine" than a traditional zombie movie.