La nuit des traquées

'Night Of The Hunted' has been slammed in the other comments posted here to date, which I find hard to understand. While the movie isn't one of Jean Rollin's best it is far from worthless. The stunning Brigitte Lahaie, star of Rollin's vampire classic 'Fascination', plays a beautiful amnesiac befriended by a passing motorist. She is in a state of panic and trying to escape somebody, but we don't know who, and neither does she. She is subsequently recaptured by a man who claims to be a doctor and is returned to a mysterious apartment block cum hospital. In there are other similarly afflicted patients, or are they prisoners? The movie is slow and puzzling and will probably appeal more to fans of J.G. Ballard or Kobo Abe than those of conventional SF or horror movies. The Cronenberg comparisons it has been given aren't exactly on the money but give some idea that this isn't your average b-grade thriller, and it is even odd for Rollin, not exactly a conventional film maker at the best of times. I say ignore 'Night Of The Hunted's flaws and you'll be in for a fascinating, if not completely satisfying, experience.

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.

I went into "Night of the Hunted" not knowing what to expect at all. I was really impressed.

It is essentially a mystery/thriller where this girl who can't remember anything gets 'rescued' by a guy who happens to be driving past. The two become fast friends and lovers and together, they try to figure out what is going on with her. Through some vague flashbacks and grim memories, they eventually get to the bottom of it and the ending is pretty cool.

I really liked the setting of this one: a desolate, post-modern Paris is the backdrop with lots of gray skies and tall buildings. Very metropolitan. Groovy soundtrack and lots of nudity.

Surprising it was made in 1980; seems somewhat ahead of it's time.

8 out of 10, kids.

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.