Carnography

Zombie Lake (1981)

According to Wikipedia, there are apparently only thirteen Nazi zombie films. This surprised me, as I'd always assumed it was quite the sub-genre (IMDB has a different list which expands the number to 48, but it also has a much wider scope), but I guess that's some cognitive bias at work there. Maybe Nazi zombie films are more memorable because, well, they're Nazi zombie films, and because they stand out to us more it seems like it's a bigger sub-genre than it actually is.

So, obviously, Zombie Lake is a Nazi zombie film, or all that Nazi zombie talk would be nothing more than a bizarre non-sequitur.

Set nominally in the 1950s, Zombie Lake opens with a young woman arriving at a lake just outside a small town in France, stripping off and, in clear defiance of the "No Swimming! - Nazi Zombies!" sign there, goes for a dip in the lake and gets pulled underwater by some Nazi zombies. (I'm not kidding about the sign, by the way - it has no words on it, but a picture of a person swimming crossed out, followed by a skull and crossbones symbol. The only way it could have been clearer is if they had added a swastika to the sign.) When the villagers find out about this, they sigh and shrug their shoulders - nothing to be done but keep avoiding the lake, they say; it's always been cursed.

In fact, while local stories might have claimed that the lake was cursed for a few hundred years, the problems only really started about ten years previously during the Second World War, when partisan villagers ambushed and killed a platoon of Nazis and threw their bodies into the lake. (We find all this out via a flashback that's conducted almost entirely without anyone speaking, effectively making it a flashback delivered via mime.) Just to further muddy the waters (hah!) however, one of the Nazis is actually a "good" Nazi - he has an affair with a local woman he saves and they end up having a daughter. Even after he's been zombified, he comes back to see his daughter, giving her a necklace that belonged to her mother and going on walks with her while the rest of his troop are eating a woman's basketball team who also decided to skinny-dip in the lake. Eventually the villagers decide they have to do something about the Nazi zombies in the lake (if nothing else it's proving to be bad for tourism) and so set a trap for them using the good Nazi's daughter as bait...

Zombie Lake's director is listed as one "J.A. Laser". In actuality, it was directed by Jean Rollin, who stepped in at the last minute after none other than Jesús Franco left the production. Unsurprisingly, a film that Franco hadn't wanted to direct turned out to be not that good at all, and so Rollin ended up using the pseudonym (a combination of his name and another, uncredited director called Julian de Laserna) rather than admit he had anything to do with the film for many years.

So as you might have guessed, Zombie Lake is not a particularly good film. It's slow, it's relatively bloodless, it has such a paucity of dialogue that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was originally supposed to be a silent film, most of the women in it are there purely for shameless exploitation (complete with underwater cameras shooting from below them as they swim completely naked) and the makeup effects look like they were produced in a primary school art class. Seriously, the extent of the zombie makeup is thick green poster paint on the zombies' faces, and maybe the occasional missing eye or head wound. Most of the time they don't even bother to extend the paint job below the chin.

Most of the deaths are bloodless as well - even when the Nazis are ambushed and shot down in a hail of bullets, only one or two actually bleed from their wounds (which probably also explains why, when the partisans throw their dead bodies into the lake, some of them can be clearly seen to start swimming). The preferred method of killing anyone swimming in the lake seems to be to just pull them underwater and drown them, and on the one or two occasions when someone is killed by the more traditional method of being bitten to death, there are no visible wounds, just blood smeared on the area.

And yet... it still can't really be considered to be the worst zombie movies out there, or even one of the worst ones I've even seen. I think that says something rather telling about me...

 

The Grapes of Death (1978)

Sometimes, you know you have to see a movie just by the title alone, and that whether it's good or bad, it's going to be one hell of a watch. The Grapes of Death. Les Raisins de la Mort. There was absolutely no way, when I first saw that title in the listings several years ago, that I was going to miss such a film, and to this day I have never regretted it.

Elizabeth is travelling by train to the village of Roublès (the subtitles spelt it differently, but let's go with Wikipedia) to join her fiance who works in the vineyards there. Her friend Brigitte is also on the train with her, travelling on to Spain, but soon meets a messy end when a stranger with strange oozing sores on his face and body boards the train and kills her. Elizabeth flees the train and her friend's killer, only to find herself lost in the middle of nowhere in some of the most barren countryside ever seen in a non-post-apocalyptic film. Eventually she finds an old farmhouse out in the middle of all this nowhere, where inside the farmer and his daughter sit and stand emotionlessly as Elizabeth begs them to call the police or get help. Well, they do offer her a glass of wine. The farmer has a good crop of those weeping sores on his body as well though - as does his daughter, he is quick to reveal when she and Elizabeth try to escape. Of course, her sores aren't immediately visible so he has to throw her on the table and rip her blouse open to reveal them (and her breasts) before impaling her with a pitchfork. He then has a moment of sanity and asks Elizabeth to kill him, which she does by hitting him with a car at about 10mph. Elizabeth then goes off to do some more wandering and meets several more people - a blind girl who knows something is wrong but who Elizabeth keeps trying to protect by telling her nothing is wrong as they walk past dead bodies and burning houses; a stunning blonde woman known in the credits as "La grande femme blonde" who strips off completely at one point for the most flimsy of plot reasons; an entire village of people covered in weeping sores, all of whom are murderously insane; and just when you think things can't get any more surreal, two beer-drinking Communists turn up with a rifle and a truck full of dynamite (okay, I'm not 100% certain they're Communists, but we are treated to several minutes of political statements from them at one point, including mention of fighting with the Free French in World War 2 and the desire to fight fascism wherever they find it, so I'm taking an educated guess). It turns out - this is not a spoiler because we see it at the very start of the film - that the growers at the vineyard have been using a new pesticide that has poisoned the grapes, and so anyone who drinks the wine from them starts rotting away from the inside out and goes homicidal. In the end Elizabeth finds her fiance; but as you might have guessed a film like this isn't going to have a happy ending...

With any film directed by Jean Rollin, there are a few things that you can expect from one of his films. Lots of establishing countryside shots. Plenty of female breasts bared for the camera. Very little music. Brigitte Lahaie ("La grande femme blonde"). Not a lot of emphasis on plot and a lot of emphasis on atmosphere. The Grapes of Death (which was apparently also the first gore film to be produced in France) has all of these and more. While it sounds so cheesy you could cut it with a cheese knife and have it with a good port (and it is), it also has some truly inspired moments of cinematography. The key scene that emphasizes this is the one where blind girl Lucie runs out into the village at night trying to find her lover Lucas. She is both blind and has no idea of what is going on, and so has no idea that the scabby, oozing, crazy villagers are slowly approaching her and following her around in silence, getting closer and closer to her but never actually touching her for a long time, and all grinning manically as they do. Another scene of note is where Brigitte Lahaie's character walks around the village dressed in nothing but a white billowing nightdress, holding a lead with two dogs in one hand and a burning torch in the other. There's no plot-related reason for this; it looks good so she does it. Technically, it's not a zombie movie, owing more to George Romero's anti-Agent Orange piece The Crazies, but it's close enough that we won't quibble too much about the details.

The movie does tend to drag in places - the lack of music for a lot of the film and the long shots of the countryside are the main culprits for that - and the randomness of the plot and dialogue at times will leave you wondering just what the hell is going on, but I know I found The Grapes of Death to be a surprisingly enjoyable movie for something I randomly decided to watch for the title alone at 2am one night, as well as the film that started me on my fascination with the horror films of Jean Rollin.

 

Amazon UK

Amazon US