Night of the Hunted

In what is probably his strangest film, Jean Rollin swaps the usual romantic-gothic setting with vampires for a sterile industrial environment in which the main characters gradually lose their memories, turn into wandering bodies without souls and, of course, have a lot of sex in between. Rollin manages to sexualize everything, even memory loss. But aside from the unnecessarily lengthy sex scenes (which are only there to fill the feature-length running time), the rest of the film is quite a suggestive nightmare, convincingly evoking a chaotic vision of a world of disoriented amnesiac characters wandering aimlessly like zombies through the empty corridors of a modern high-rise. Moreover, the Parisian streets, thanks to the fact that they had no money for extras, feel fittingly post-apocalyptic. The final minutes are strikingly reminiscent of the similarly haunting final shot of Fulci's horror film The Beyond, a year later. (06/09/2023)

Nothing really surprises about The Night of the Hunted, at least if you've seen anything by Jean Rollin before. There is a bit of repetition in the narrative, and although there is more plot here, it is not as essential as what is being portrayed. Surprisingly, though, The Night of the Hunted is becoming essentially a soft-porn film without much of a poetic overlay, which is what I liked about Rollin. (08/07/2019)