Die Nacht der Gehetzten

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.

Rollin's images are usually pure enough in just being themselves, that it's all a matter of how much concentrated emptiness he can shape around them; in other words he does story poorly, so when he manages to concentrate just a few strands around a sense of place his films can soothe with a dreamlike resonance.

The story here is about distraught amnesiacs kept under lock in a mysterious apartment complex. So we get a lot of somnambulist wanderings along empty corridors, a lot of stanzas about the ineffabilities of touch and connection in clinical environments; always on the verge between paralysis and sleep, bursts of emotional clarity - usually in the nude - drowned by despair.

The imports are distinctly Cartesian; so the mind matters, thought matters because ergo we are, memory, the self. Losing these is tantamount to a spiritual death.

So a lot of outdated ruminations on a philosophical level, not to say anything of Rollin's tendency to eventually rationalize the mystifying in a way that, looking back, we can contend ourselves that it all somehow made sense; here nonsense about a nuclear spill and the mind deteriorating on a cellular level.

But the sense of place is occasionally just powerful enough, the emptiness mirrored outside in desolate urban landscapes, that it merits one viewing for fans. You can relax with this, but perhaps a bit too much.

This Rollin movie takes us into a surreal world, the cold architecture of satellite cities, with touches of 70s sci-fi from Rollerball to Rainer Erler, but nevertheless with Rollin's usual sex and gore obsessions. Several actresses had previous experience in the hardcore genre and provide gratuitous nudity, while any gore-hound will remember the suicide scene when the woman kills herself by stabbing a pair of scissors through her eyes into the brain. No, this is not a movie for the faint-hearted, but by no means a simple exploitation flick either.

Let us take a closer look at the story. Robert, a young man, drives through the night, when suddenly Elisabeth (Brigitte Lahaie) appears in front of his car. She seems confused and remembers nothing except her name and that she was trying to escape - but from where and from whom? Robert takes Elisabeth to his home, but a doctor followed them and he takes Elisabeth back to the place she ran away from - a lunatic asylum in a skyscraper. Robert has doubts that this a normal psychiatric hospital, it rather looks like a prison with the heavily armed guards. Does the doctor have a secret to hide?

This is a surprisingly quiet movie, literally. Music is often absent from the soundtrack. This stylistic means fits the situation of the mentally ill who complain about their loss of memory or lack of ability to use their limbs. Many scenes are painfully slow moving, but if you liked other movies by Rollin, you won't mind. That is setting a mood of intensity and concentration that you get into or you don't. The human touches are well done, especially the scene when Elisabeth feeds another inmate who cannot hold a spoon with her hands. Furthermore, I want to point out the memorable performance of red-haired Dominique Journet (in her first screen appearance!) as Véronique, Elisabeth's friend who tried to escape with her. When she loses the ability to speak and wanders around with empty eyes - behind which lies a scream -, such are moments of absolute horror, but in a very sophisticated way. The motif of two girls trying to survive together in a strange, hostile world, by the way, is one of the most typical for Rollin, see "Les Deux Orphelines Vampires" for example. And just like that later film, "La Nuit des Traquees" is a good movie for its low budget!

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.

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.