Acoso en la noche

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.

In this film Jean Rollin traded in his usual surrealist-Gothic, crumbling-castle-by-the-seaside setting for a cold, modern Paris office building. Still this film has the same strange atmosphere of haunting romanticism and the interesting visuals that characterize the director's best work. The plot is uncharacteristically coherent--a man falls in love with a woman who has escaped from a high-rise clinic where she is being kept along with a number of other patients whose memories, identities, and very minds are being eaten away as the result of an environmental accident. On a superficial level, the movie seems like a cross between David Cronenberg's "Shivers" and George Romero's "The Crazies", but it's a Rollin film all the way focusing more on the tragic romance than the conspiracy angle. There's too much dialog and much of it is pretty inane, but some of it is actually pretty moving. It makes you think of the plight of Alzheimer's patients (albeit young, attractive, and frequently naked ones). The only real let-down is the acting. Brigitte Lahaie is a great actress for a former porn star, but that's kind of like being a great basketball player for a quadriplegic. The male lead is a stiff and the guy playing the doctor is pretty unconvincing. Still,if you like Rollin films in general, this one is worth checking out at least.

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.

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.