The Night of the Hunted

This is no doubt one of the best Jean Rolling movies. I take one star off because I think movie director Jean Rolling should put deleted scenes back to the movie. Those deleted scenes were beautifully shot with good picture quality.

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!

typical 70's-80's French cinema with lots of gratuitous sex and fake blood, and subpar acting, with overdone scenes and a slow burn action sequence, this is not such a bad story. The overt sex scenes detract a bit, but it does become part of the story arc, importantly.Watch it if you enjoy a good story. It'll actually hurt you in your heart if you can get past the schtick.

I didn’t like it

Not only was this movie w its twits n turns, what is the mystery of the black tower? Who wer those doctors? What was wrong w them n the first place?All these n more r answer n jean's twisted way, not to mention brigitte nude!!!N the two deleted sex scenes makes it a crime not to ownIf ur a jean rollin fan as I am, i would get this movie, jus to b a part of his legacyAs well as...DemoniacsFascinationR some of my highest rating for rollin's films, I bought this film,N u should TOO!!!

The director Jean Rollin makes rather off beat films, a little strange using very beautiful women.

A Jean Rollin later film and classic starring one of my favorite Rollin girls Brigitte Lahaie with a mysterious sci fi plot, cold city setting, great cinematography & acid jazz score also has Lahaie's best sex scene! Watching these movies on blu ray is like watching them for the first time, high rewatchability if your into cool cinematography, french jazz & Brigitte Lahaie with amnesia escapeing from a ghostly hospital, which might be the cause of her memory failure highly recommended if you're into it

I'm just getting into foreign horror movie. This movie was "interesting". Don't watch with wife and kids though.

well worth the watch, yes there is some nudity but this is all part of leading you to conclusions that turn out to be totally wrong. the last 5 minutes turn every assumption you make totally on there head

Cons: This issue does not have the original cover.Pros: Slow burner hold on, there is a big reveal towards the end. The closing shot is quite beautiful.

This is an astoundingly bad film ... and interesting to watch for that reason. Jean Rollin is a genuinedly gifted, if frequently disorganised, under funded and evidently sponsor influenced director: at his best his visual sense and ability to present unforgettable scenes is almost unrivalled. He gives you time to look at the pictures - forget about the stories - and his use of lighting and skill in emphasising the depth of scenes - using passages, doorways, sweeps of stairs, distant backgrounds - are always, or at least usually, a joy. His slightly dotty plots - half baked science fiction ideas, lack of rational continuity (why are the two girls being shot at at the start of Requiem for a Vampire? - I have never found out) are an amusement of surprises in themselves. (Who else has ended up making his vampires the good guys? -"Requiem ..", "La Fiancee de Dracula" "Levres de Sang"...) Most of that flair mis-fires in "La Nuit des Traquees", though for once the diction is clear enough to follow easily! The idea of looking at the plight of people losing their memory, personality, futures, is a good enough subject. Both Brigitte Lahaie and Dominique Journet act touchingly and with considerable poise and talent - but the logic with which their situation is shown, and the explanation set behind it, are slipshod and silly; the details of the story are ramshackle and, it seems to me, improperly derivative - echoed from SS doctors in concentration camps, from the gas oven body disposal, from euthanasia of "degenerates" and so on. Even the images do not work very well - we have the inhuman scale of the city, with its crawling distant traffic, the faceless, looming tower blocks, fronted with eyeless walls of glass; we have the hint of corporate, or perhaps government, cruel inhumanity, but all this is rather routine and takes us nowhere. For the sake, presumably, of sponsors and a certain class of sensation seeking viewers we do get some fairly nasty gore and some fairly powerful, and long drawn out, pornographic scenes - alas! Astoundingly bad, indeed, though it is interesting to see just how what has worked well elsewhere fails spectacularly here. (One amusing feature is to observe how, as in some other of M. Rollin's films, pistols are routinely produced on the instant from almost anyone's pocket and are used to no particular plot serving purpose. The body count goes quite high. Very French ...) M. Rollin deserves bigger budgets and more time to think.

One of Rollin's best movies. No vampires but you gotta love Brigitte Lahaie.

Hier haben wir es mit einem Spätwerk aus der Qualitätsphase des Regisseurs Jean Rollin zu tun. In den 80er Jahren glitt dieser hochbegabte surrealistische Künstler geschmacklich unerklärlicherweise in einen Irrweg ab. Er präsentierte blutige Horror-Schlachtorgien. Dieser Film jedoch gehört noch zu seinen Spitzenleistungen. Ich kann ihn unbedenklich empfehlen. Die Disk war in Ordnung, die Digitalisierung war hervorragend - von Donau-Film.