Night of the Hunted (1980)

Set in the near future and taking place in an eerily desolate Paris, Night of the Hunted centers on Elisabeth (hauntingly played by Brigitte Lahaie), a young woman who is suffering from a bizarre form of amnesia; she can only remember the present and once an experience ends, it leaves her mind as well. As she herself explains it early on, Elisabeth is doomed to live eternally in the moment. However, she is not alone in her affliction. She lives in a "Black Tower" with several others also cursed to live continually in the moment. Though she is supposedly under the treatment of a coldly impersonal Doctor and his sinister aide, Solange, Elisabeth is really more of a prisoner than a patient. When Elisabeth finally manages to escape the tower, she is picked up by a young man named Robert and promptly forgets just where and from what she escaped. After spending the night with Robert, she is recaptured by the doctor and Solange and taken back to the tower. She promptly forgets Robert as well but Robert doesn't forget her and his attempts to find and rescue her eventually lead the film to its truly tragic conclusion.

This deceptively low-key French film has been unjustly maligned by many critics over the years and, indeed, it is a flawed film. With the exception of Lahaie, the acting is uniformly wooden and the film's low budget is, at times, painfully apparent. However, underneath its undeniably crude and, at times, rather sleazy surface, Night of the Hunted boasts a wealth of treasure for the discriminating filmgoer. As directed by the great (if undeniably idiosyncratic) French filmmaker Jean Rollin, Night of the Hunted is a haunting meditation on the importance of memory and the horrors of living with no individual identity. In the scenes in which Elisabeth and her fellow patients/prisoners struggle to comprehend the few fragments of their past that they have left and basically create new fictional memories to replace the reality that they have left, Rollin manages to achieve a truly graceful sense of melancholy poignance. Those that have criticized this film for its occasionally graphic violence and sex tend to ignore the fact that, as opposed to other more acclaimed mainstream films, every one of those scenes can be seen as a logical result of the story Rollin weaves. It is proof of Rollin's talent that he takes scenes that could have easily been laughable and kitschy in the hands of other directors and manages to make them actually quite affecting. Indeed, the film's final sequence is probably one of the most truly sad (though not necessarily depressing) to have ever been captured on film and both the sequence and everything that it implies stays with the viewer long after the film has ended. Night of the Hunted stands as strong evidence that Jean Rollin is truly a poet of the pulp imagination. It is an underrated, uncommon film; one designed to be appreciated by the uncommon viewer.

if you're looking for something strange that will hold your attention & keep you glued to the screen until the living end, you just might be ready for night of the hunted. rollin's great masterpiece will leave you shaking your head in disbelief but never fails to amaze & excite. those of you gore hounds who just seek out some blood & guts, you will probably find more with his endeavor living dead girl. there is some blood here but the atmosphere is what will grab you & shake you. in the chilling tradition of eyes wide shut or memento, rollin gives you the full effect of paranoia & loss of memory. the film does make sense contrary to what many have wrote here but you have to view this film carefully & look for the hints. in the end, night of the hunted reveals it's dark secrets & the ending is sure to burn it's way into your thoughts for a long time. although we find no vampires here, it's evident that rollin is a serious director & treats his subject matter here with greatest of care. this film will not appeal to folks who tend to avoid pyschological horror or explicit sex. as with most rollin films, night of the hunted isn't intended for all audiences. the film start out with a young girl in a flimsy gown walking in the woods & then a flash of carlights stops her dead in her tracks. the guy naturally picks the girl up & offers to take her home but she can't remember who she is or where home is. in the next scenes, we see she's been taken back to this mysterious tower by a strange man & woman where it seems everyone has lost their mind or they are in the process of losing their minds. here we find a sad building of people struggling to make sense out of the world they are living in or their confusing lives. to provide comfort or security to one another, they invent stories to take the place of non-existent memories. eventually, our lead character tries to escape again & then things really start to get tangled. great rollin film that has nothing to do with the creatures of the night or the immortals.

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A group of people being held captive in an apparently empty skyscraper are slowly loosing their minds. They are not going insane, their memories and personalities are simply, and slowly, being erased. The whole movie plays out like a surreal version of David Cronenberg's Shivers (aka They Came from Within). This movie really weirded me out and robbed me of a good night of sleep. It took me quite a while to shake the effect off, so I recommend it heartily.

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Imagine the terror of losing every shred of your memory. Every piece of your past is nothing but a ambiguous broken puzzle. There is no foundation for you to grasp on to and seek comfort in. Night of the Hunted is quite an unsettling case of lost identity.

Director Jean Rollin pulls you into another mental realm, one that is devoid of all familiar conscious thought. This is quite a diversion from his typical stuff. It's still a low budget affair equipped with minimalist sets and beautiful porn star actresses. Graphic nudity and bloody madness also get arbitrarily inserted, but are minimal and fairly inconsequential to the plot. This is more just a psychological jaunt.

It feels like a cross between Memento and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A group of people are unwillingly confined to a tower. Lab rats, yee-haw! Due to a radiation leak, their brains are rotting away as they lose their memories and motor functions.

As their mental capacity continues to diminish, their loneliness and anxiety becomes insurmountable. They all desperately form false memories in order to cope and connect with other people. There also is of course a sinister doctor watching closely and determined to safeguard their horrible fate.

Night of the Hunted is not some brainless gorefest. We are forced to watch a group of disoriented people from a somewhat detatched perspective. It is difficult to fully connect with their hopeless predicament and grasp the true horror of their situation. Thumbs up!

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Night of the Hunted is a beautiful and gory film that make Jean Rollin's vampire films more interesting. Night of the Hunted is an adult horror film that features extreme gore, gratuitous sex and nudity, and beautiful shots. This is a must see for any Jean Rollin fan.

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