The Night of the Hunted

A woman named Elizabeth has lost her memory. After being found by a man, she is taken in but soon captured and brought to the "black tower" with other mindless women...

Whoa, a Jean Rollin film without female vampires in a castle by the sea? Yes, kids, he did make other kinds of films, and this is one of them. But he has kept his trademark excessive nudity. Plenty of nude women, at least two nude men, and some sex scenes that go on for far too long (if you cut the sex out of Rollin's work, you are not left with much).

The first half of the film is a bit slow and not particularly interesting. The second half picks up and then we really see the horror aspects come out to play. The story gets even better as the revelations are produced and we find out more about these women and why they are where they are.

I have seen the film compared to "Shivers", and I do not completely disagree. But there is more than enough here with Rollin's unique stamp, so to simply dismiss it as being like "Shivers" is a big mistake. Though, if your intent is to direct "Shivers" fans to another film, by all means, do so.

The ever gorgeous Brigitte Lahaie wanders aimlessly through this Kafka-esque plot about an amnesiac trying to escape from a strange clinic where the staff tortures and sexually abuses patients as part of some undefined rehabilitation process. Could have been interesting had the ideas been better developed, but director Rollin concentrates more on getting Ms. Lahaie and the other female cast members out of their clothes rather than trivial matters such as story and characterization. The sterile atmosphere makes for some bland visuals and without Rollin's trademark gothic settings, there is little to entice the eye, apart from said lovelies.

The Night of the Hunted (1980)

* (out of 4)

While driving through the country one night, a man picks up a woman (Brigitte Lahaie) who can't remember who she is or where she came from. It turns out the woman belongs to an asylum where others are suffering from memory loss but why? The better question would be who cares? I'm usually a fan of director Jean Rollin but this thing here is just a complete disaster. I first watched this movie probably a decade ago and decided to give it another shot, thinking that perhaps I had been too hard on it, but no, this here is a complete mess from start to finish with very few redeeming qualities. I guess the best thing that can be said about this movie is that at least Rollin keeps offering up French beauties and making them take their clothes off. The lovely Lahaie is actually fairly good in her role of the amnesiac but sadly the screenplay simply gives her nothing to do except walk around and acting dumb. I say acting dumb because there's not a single second where I believed anything that was going on in the story. Rollin has never been strong at making a fast paced film. As with many others, this here goes by very slowly but it's almost deadly here simply because you don't care about the story or what's really going on. Fans of Rollin might find something haunting here but to me this was just a complete misfire.

A young man driving through an unnamed French city chances upon a startled girl in a nightdress. To say she's confused is an understatement, as she asks for help, forgets about asking for help, forgets about where she is, what her name is, and general seems to have her mind wiped completely clean. The young man drives her back to his house, unheeding of the other girl left behind in the woods.

The rescued girl is called Elisabeth, but that's about all she remembers. Our young man, Robert, settles her down in is home, not knowing that some mysterious people have followed them there in a car. After a morally dubious, lengthy sex session with Elisabeth, Robert sets off for work only for a doctor and nurse to appear and take Elisabeth 'home', which turns out to be a huge monolithic black tower.

By the time Elisabeth has forgotten all about Robert, and is taken back to what she's told is her room, where a similarly stricken girl called Catherine lives. Elisabeth, as far as she can perceive, realises that everyone in the tower block is like her, with the exception of a rape happy orderly, the doctor, and those armed guards stopping anyone from leaving. There's also Veronique, who turns out to be the girl who tried to escape with Elisabeth at the start of the film.

The question is, why is Elisabeth there and what is the purpose of the doctor and his minions? Don't expect a custard pie fight and a sing-a-long at end of this one as the film descends into gory murders and suicides, gun fights, and another escape attempts due to Elisabeth finding Robert's phone number in her pocket (she doesn't remember him of course, but he remembers her!).

Between this and The Grapes of Death, I cannot believe that Jean Rollin was the man responsible for the terrible Zombie Lake. Both Grape and this are short on plot but high in atmosphere, and this one, although not exactly a pulse-racing action fest, is fascinating as a mystery and a grim modern horror. The clinical interiors of the black tower just add to the unease, as does the brutal violence that comes out of nowhere.

This being a Jean Rollin film, and a French film, every lady in this one gets naked. This is why I love tracking down all these films, there's always one or two that come out of nowhere and surprise.

I've never made to the end of Zombie Lake, but I'm going to give it another go.

Night of the Hunted is ostensibly something of a departure for French horror auteur Jean Rollin. Its story is on the face of it unusual for the director. Its about a mysterious clinic in a high-rise building where patients have a mental disorder where their memories and identities are disintegrating due to an environmental accident. The setting is in the middle of a city and the visuals are ones of sterile urban alienation as opposed to the Gothic surrealism more typically associated with Rollin. Yet, within this veneer is a film that anyone even remotely familiar with the director's work can identify quite easily as one of his films. It has the typical Rollin characters - alluring yet strangely asexual young women in the central roles and extremely dull men in the periphery. The dialogue is as poor as always. The story is as flimsy and senseless as its possible to be. There is an abundance of nudity. It has the strange melancholic, romantic atmosphere which always makes his movies so odd for horror films. And it also displays Rollin's eye for the surreal. The ending in particular on the grassy viaduct over the city being a perfect example of this. In other words, Night of the Hunted, despite surface differences contains all the strengths and weaknesses that all Rollin films have.

The story and setting itself very much recalls the work of David Cronenberg. But the similarities are entirely superficial. As Rollin is pretty much diametrically opposite in approach to Cronenberg as a filmmaker. Where the latter is highly scientific in his approach, Rollin is a pure romantic. In fairness, the story here could have done with a bit of developing to make it entirely satisfying but then you could probably say that about all the other films in the directors oeuvre to some extent. There is a quite nice score which certainly adds to the atmosphere well; while Brigitte Lahaie is a good presence and by some distance the only memorable actor in the entire film.

If you have any hope of enjoying this film you need to be able to buy into the weird haunting world typical of this director. You need to have some appreciation of his visual ideas too. Otherwise I expect you may dislike this rather a lot. I wouldn't say this is a particularly accessible Rollin film; I'm not really sure there is such a thing.