La nuit des traquées

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!

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.

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.

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.