The Night of the Hunted (1980)

Purely Joyful Movie!

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

"Night of the Hunted" has a great opening. A man drives down a road at night, the ethereal soundtrack playing. He picks up a strange woman. She is confused and can't remember much. The first woman has left a nude girl behind. Welcome back to the weird world of Jean Rollin.This film was Rollin's first non-pornographic effort after "Fascination" and the two have much in common. Both star the lovely Bridget Lahaie. Like "Fascination," "Night of the Hunted" is the filmmaker breaking from his usual subject matter of frequently naked vampires. Both have a more accessible storyline then the director's usual fair. Both brush up against soft core. Despite the similarities, "Night of the Hunted" isn't as good as "Fascination." The film isn't obviously horror at first. The story revolves around a mental hospital where people have their memories wiped, leaving the victims confused. The reasoning behind this is never explained. To be expected, the set-up is used more to explore potential themes. The inhabitants of the apartment are in a constant state of existential crisis. One girl, Lahaie's roommate, can't even feed herself without breaking down. Another woman cries out constantly for a missing child she can't remember. One man seems to be constantly in the throes of a nervous breakdown. The logistics of the memory loss are inconsistent. The janitor, another victim, seems to have a solid grip on his mind. Lahaie goes back and forth, sometime appearing lucid, other times insecure. While in the throes of orgasm with the man who rescued her, Lahaie swears to never forget this experience. She does anyway. I can't tell if this is intentional or sloppy writing.The biggest problem with "Night of the Hunted" is pacing. Its start off strong and Robert, the man, rescuing this beautiful, strange girl is fairly captivating. When she's taken back to the hospital, the film degrades into a series of more-or-less unrelated sequences. The roommate cries into her lobster soup. The janitor rapes a girl before a random man beats him to death with a hammer. The roommate stabs herself in the eyes. A nurse seduces the nervous man but he looses it mid-coitous and strangles her. The friendship between Elizabeth and Veronique tries to create a center to the story. Two female leads are a Rollin trademark but Veronique is a weak character so it's hard for the audience to relate.Near the end, Robert shows up in an attempt to rescue his girl. Suddenly, the movie features a lot of gun play, people getting shot left and right. It's revealed that the hospital is killing and burning the body of the amnesic patients. Why? Shrugs. "Night of the Hunted" wraps up on a hauntingly poetic image: Two lobotomized lovers walking off hand in hand. The movie needed more poetic moments like that. The film isn't bad Rollin but it's uneven Rollin. Probably only for fans.

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.

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" stars French porn star Brigitte Lahaie.In fact,many of the cast members in this slow-moving production were porn actors at the time of its frantic filming.This film is certainly different than Rollin's usual lesbian vampire flicks,but it's not as memorable as for example "Lips of Blood" or "Fascination".Lahaie plays an amnesiac hitchhiker who can't remember who she is or where she came from.Most of the film takes place in a modern apartment complex,where Lahaie is being held by some kind of medical group that's treating a number of people with a similar condition.Anyway,she escapes from the monolithic office tower where the affected people are held.On a highway outside of town,she meets a young man,who stops and picks her up."Night of the Hunted" offers plenty of nudity,unfortunately the pace is extremely slow.The atmosphere is horribly sad and the relationship between Brigitte Lahaie and another asylum inmate Dominique Journet is well-developed.Still "Night of the Hunted" is too dull to be completely enjoyable.Give it a look only if you are a fan of Jean Rollin's works.7 out of 10 and that's being kind.