"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.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this. Sure it is a bit slow moving in parts, but what else would one expect from Rollin? Also there is plenty of nudity, nothing wrong with that, particularly as it includes lots of the gorgeous, Brigitte Lahaie. There are also some spectacularly eroticised female dead, bit more dodgey, perhaps, but most effective. There is also a sci-fi like storyline with a brief explanation at the end, but I wouldn't bother too much with that. No, here we have a most interesting exploration of memory and the effect of memory loss and to just what extent one is still 'alive' without memory. My DVD sleeve mentions David Cronenberg and whilst this is perhaps not quite as good as his best films, there is some similarity here, particularly with the great use of seemingly menacing architecture and the effective and creepy use of inside space. As I have tried to indicate this is by no means a rip roaring thriller, it is a captivating, nightmare like movie that makes the very most of its locations, including a stunning railway setting at the end.

Even if you're a fan of Jean Rollin's idiosyncratic body of work, you will be caught off guard by this exceptional foray into science fiction territory. For once, there's not a single diaphanously gowned vampire girl in sight ! True to tradition, the budget proved way too tight to realize the director's vision entirely. Yet this is largely compensated by his obvious love of genre cinema, dedication to his craft and sheer ingenuity. Jean-Claude Couty's atmospheric cinematography makes the most of the foreboding locations and Philippe Bréjean (a/k/a "Gary Sandeur") contributes a startling soundtrack that fortunately doesn't resemble any of the sappy stuff he composed for hardcore.Shot in and around a Paris office block before and after working hours, the film was largely cast with porn regulars Rollin was already quite familiar with from his "Michel Gentil" cash-gathering XXX efforts, most notably French f*ck film royalty Brigitte Lahaie in the demanding lead. Playing Elisabeth (rather well, I might add), she's picked up wandering a nearby highway one night by Robert (Vincent Gardère), driving home at the end of a long work day. Barely able to piece together the string of events that got her there, Elisabeth seems to lose her memories mere moments after events occur, even forgetting Robert's name and heroic savior role before their night flight comes to an end at his apartment. Prior to making love, she rightfully describes herself as a virgin (further credit to Brigitte's thespian skills that she can handle the line so convincingly, being after all one of the more active adult actresses of the '70s) because she cannot recall a single touch preceding his. Because of this nifty bit of context, the relatively long sex scene that follows totally eschews the gratuity of other "commercial" interludes Rollin has had to include in other works to assure funding.When Robert leaves for work, he's inevitably erased from Elisabeth's feeble mind. A mysterious doctor (comedian Bernard Papineau effectively cast against type) and his menacing assistant Solange (striking porn starlet Rachel Mhas) move in on her during her protector's absence and take her back to the place she turns out to have escaped from. Here we get one of the movie's strongest scenes as she's re-introduced to her roommate Catherine (the late Cathérine Greiner a/k/a hardcore performer "Cathy Stewart" in a quietly devastating turn), both girls desperately supplying fictitious shared "memories" for one another in a bid to outrun their inevitable fate. That deterioration is not solely limited to the mind becomes painfully clear when they are served lunch and Catherine's unable to control her movements in trying to eat a spoonful of soup. It's also Catherine who gets to voice the filmmaker's compromise with the demands of commerce as she urges Elisabeth to get naked and hold her because sex is all they have left now that both mind and physical faculties have deserted them.Several rather explicit - if not quite hardcore - sex scenes make up the movie's mid-section and French porn aficionados should recognize the likes of Alain Plumey (a/k/a "Cyril Val"), Jacques Gateau and Elodie Delage, along with a blink and miss bit from future porno princess Marilyn Jess whose rape at the hands, mouth and member of Plumey was only present in the film's rarely screened XXX version FILLES TRAQUEES. The pivotal part of Véronique, a girl Elisabeth almost seems to remember and whom she seeks to escape anew with, is beautifully handled by the exquisite Dominique Journet - in her unforgettable debut - who would go on to play a sizable supporting role in Franco Zeffirelli's LA TRAVIATA. The six feet under ending reveals the deteriorating condition to be the result of a nuclear spill, the quarantined "patients" ultimately leaving a barely breathing empty shell, unceremoniously disposed off in a fiery furnace. The final shot offers a particularly heartbreaking variation on that of Chaplin's MODERN TIMES as Elisabeth, approaching complete meltdown by now, and a wounded Robert stumble along the railroad bridge, clumsily clasping each other's outstretched hands.

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.