NSFW warning/enticement: Totally gratuitous horror movie tits ahead.

It’s just so typical of Euro travel. Just when you’ve got settled into your train seat with your best gal pal, a magazine and a pretty mountain view, some creepy guy comes in your compartment breathing heavily and the next thing you know he’s clawing at the glistening pustules on his face and staggering after you when you escape. And then he kills your friend. And you’re like, “first I burned my fingers on that paper-thin plastic cup they served my € 4 espresso in this morning, now this?!”

The “bleeding pancake batter” variety of zombie infection.

Sometimes, a movie’s title can say absolutely nothing about what you’re going to be watching (“Skew”? “Insidious”? “The Absent”? Those aren’t horror movies. That’s the lineup at the Gobi Tent at Coachella.) But naming a movie “Les Raisins de la Mort” (“The Grapes of Death”) seems to be pretty straight-forward. It establishes the following expectations: deadly wine, France and humor.

“Grapes of Death” has all three. In abundance. But if writer-director Jean Rollin intended the funny parts of “Grapes of Death” to be, well, funny, then he had one hell of a poker face when he was telling his actors to play the whole thing like “Macbeth.”

“OK, Marie, now that Elizabeth’s jumped off the train, we’re going to need about an hour’s worth of footage of you running away. Part of it is going to be filmed partially on a day where the country looks like a foggy hellscape suitable for a Guns and Roses video, and partially on a glistening spring day that makes the a synth-orchestrated countryside look like a disposable douche commercial. You’ll come across a dilapidated house. Go inside and stare at the older guy and the girl your age who live there. They’ll stare at you for another hour. We’re going to cut back and forth between them and you. It will be intensely awkward, and trés sexy. Especially with all this primitive 70s-era handheld camera wobbling all over the place even on shots where the camera could be cemented in place, there’s so little going on. So cinéma vérité.”

It’s times like these that you want to yank the unlabeled bottle out of the movie and drown your boredom. Despite the knowledge that, because of the title, that it’s probably evil wine. (Or perhaps because you know it’s evil wine?) But then, wonderful things start happening. Things that make you giggle and shriek and pause and rewind and go frame-by-frame.

In Lesson One of who never to trust when you’re running away from the suspiciously scabrous, the older guy tears his daughter’s shirt off to prove she’s a zombie. Just kidding. He really does it so we get the poster-quality shot of alabaster tits, grimy farmhouse pitchfork impaled on the right, and… an “infection” that looks like a plastic gag vomit toy glued onto a woman’s ribs and edged with lipstick.

Do you whistle, gag, or steal the plastic vomit for future pranks?

Elizabeth steals a car, crushes the older man against a pillar at idle speed, and stops at another abandoned looking stone village with grass-covered streets. Because that totally seems like the smartest thing to do at this point. Unsurprisingly, another zombie comes shambling out of the shadows, bleeding Velveeta from his forehead and leaving sticky yellow trails of bloody pus on her car window until he shatters it and she remembers, duh, I stole a handgun!

I think it’s OK to pop that thing now, Billy.

Oh, but it gets better. And by better, I mean far, far worse. Despite having vanquished her latest enemies, Elizabeth runs off into the countryside at full tear. And when she meets a bizarre blind girl with white contacts and a white dress, wandering through the standing stones and scrubland of the south of France, she sees no reason not to trust her. Because she’s doing so splendidly with strangers so far. Luckily, the blind girl’s lover shows up, strips her to her waist because that makes it easier to nail her wrists to the door (wait, that makes no sense whatsoever!) and then attempts the most awkward “beheading” ever: He raises his hatchet, the camera cuts away to show our fearful heroine, we cut back to see the blind girl replaced by a very plastic mannequin, the hacking begins, accompanied by the honest-to-god sound of someone chopping wood. When the “head” is pulled too-cleanly away from the “neck,” a lame trickle of blood spurts out of the repurposed garden-irrigation hose stuffed in the plastic mannequin.

Plastic and blood: This is how they make McRibs in France.

Our heroine, meanwhile, is standing there watching all this instead of trying to gain distance on Monsieur Old Man Shuffle Speed, and when she finally decides to run away, she makes Classic Dumb Girl Horror Move #194, looking away every few seconds instead of using her observational powers to peer up and see if, say, the stairs she’s running up lead to a dead-end brick patio. Lucky for her, she’s pulled into a safe house by an oddly bewitching blonde with a cult-crazy smile. Such a scene can go three ways: unexpected seduction, totally obvious she’s-a-zombie switcheroo, or the blonde is actually a Herbalife distributor.

“I like what you’re doing with the flaming torch and the truck full of dynamite, Odessa,

but you’re not working your angles.”

Because the movie is ticking down and two seeming hero types with clear gazes and long rifles have showed up at the town, our heroine is finally catching on, and blonde girl gets a burning branch to her face. In its last few minutes, the movie — through the two guys who escaped the infection because they’re beer drinkers — tries to make a few inarticulate points about fascism, nationalism, and the military-industrial perils of living in between a military base and a nuclear plant. Oh, France.

Yeah, team up with the hunters who don’t even know proper trigger discipline. This will end great.

But while we get plenty of ideas for pretentious college essays (“The Semiotics of Horror: Who’s Eating Our Brains, Zombies or Intermarché?”) we don’t get any plausible explanations for anything we saw. The movie is nothing but our dumb heroine’s discovery of a new and possibly sympathetic stranger, the discovery that the trusted stranger is actually just a zombie, and the stranger being killed. Lather, reapply kohl to the eyes, repeat. “Grapes of Death” is horrible. Horrible because no one said, during editing, “I don’t get this at. ALL.” — like when Elizabeth escapes from a house to the sounds of manic piano clattering, and when she gets in an escape video, the piano stops, as though she were trying to get away from Mother Nature’s new Tori Amos album. Horrible because between the repeated lines of dialog and the fact that the camera holds on shots like we’re idiots who need 20 seconds for it to sink in that a drop of blood is sliding 1 cm down someone’s forehead, there’s so much padding in this movie it’s a wonder no crumpled tissue paper fell out. Horrible because it could have been a final exam for aspiring cinema special effects makeup artists (hopefully, they were all flunked). Horrible because it was probably set in abandoned portions of French countryside to save on location fees, so the filmmakers would be assured enough free, empty villages where no one’s lived since Cardinal Richelieu was a gonorrhea-ridden military officer. Not that there’s no upside to all of this.

You said it.

Thank goodness “Grapes of Death” had a criminally insufficient budget — funded properly, it would be unwatchably horrible.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.