Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Woodyanders One can always depend on French cult filmmaker Jean Rollin to come up with something bizarre and different -- and this quirky excursion into sci-fi territory certainly fits that particular outre bill quite nicely. The gorgeous Brigitte Lahaie delivers a fine and affecting performance as Elysabeth, a young woman who has been stricken with a peculiar mental disorder that's causing her to slowly, but surely lose both her identity and memories. Elysabeth finds herself trapped in an oppressive high-rise clinic building with a bunch of other people suffering from the same malady.Rollin relates the intriguing premise at a deliberate pace, ably crafts a compelling enigmatic mood, wrings a good deal of pathos from the offbeat premise (the final image in particular is simply heartbreaking), makes good use of cold urban structures and landscapes, astutely captures the existential horror of being reduced to a mindless vegetable state, and, naturally, doesn't skimp on either the yummy female nudity or arousing soft-core sex. The sound acting by the capable cast holds everything together: Ravishing redhead Dominique Journet as the forlorn Veronique, Vincent Gardere as the smitten Robert, Bernard Papineau as the chilly Dr. Francis, Rachel Mhas as equally aloof assistant Solange, and Cathy Stewart as the needy Catherine. Kudos are also in order for Philippe Brejean's droning electronic score and Jean-Claude Couty's stark, yet still stunning cinematography. An interesting curio.

Michael_Elliott The Night of the Hunted (1980) * (out of 4) While driving through the country one night, a man picks up a woman (Brigitte Lahaie) who can't remember who she is or where she came from. It turns out the woman belongs to an asylum where others are suffering from memory loss but why? The better question would be who cares? I'm usually a fan of director Jean Rollin but this thing here is just a complete disaster. I first watched this movie probably a decade ago and decided to give it another shot, thinking that perhaps I had been too hard on it, but no, this here is a complete mess from start to finish with very few redeeming qualities. I guess the best thing that can be said about this movie is that at least Rollin keeps offering up French beauties and making them take their clothes off. The lovely Lahaie is actually fairly good in her role of the amnesiac but sadly the screenplay simply gives her nothing to do except walk around and acting dumb. I say acting dumb because there's not a single second where I believed anything that was going on in the story. Rollin has never been strong at making a fast paced film. As with many others, this here goes by very slowly but it's almost deadly here simply because you don't care about the story or what's really going on. Fans of Rollin might find something haunting here but to me this was just a complete misfire.

chaos-rampant Rollin's images are usually pure enough in just being themselves, that it's all a matter of how much concentrated emptiness he can shape around them; in other words he does story poorly, so when he manages to concentrate just a few strands around a sense of place his films can soothe with a dreamlike resonance.The story here is about distraught amnesiacs kept under lock in a mysterious apartment complex. So we get a lot of somnambulist wanderings along empty corridors, a lot of stanzas about the ineffabilities of touch and connection in clinical environments; always on the verge between paralysis and sleep, bursts of emotional clarity - usually in the nude - drowned by despair. The imports are distinctly Cartesian; so the mind matters, thought matters because ergo we are, memory, the self. Losing these is tantamount to a spiritual death. So a lot of outdated ruminations on a philosophical level, not to say anything of Rollin's tendency to eventually rationalize the mystifying in a way that, looking back, we can contend ourselves that it all somehow made sense; here nonsense about a nuclear spill and the mind deteriorating on a cellular level.But the sense of place is occasionally just powerful enough, the emptiness mirrored outside in desolate urban landscapes, that it merits one viewing for fans. You can relax with this, but perhaps a bit too much.

Leonard Smalls: The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse I went into "Night of the Hunted" not knowing what to expect at all. I was really impressed.It is essentially a mystery/thriller where this girl who can't remember anything gets 'rescued' by a guy who happens to be driving past. The two become fast friends and lovers and together, they try to figure out what is going on with her. Through some vague flashbacks and grim memories, they eventually get to the bottom of it and the ending is pretty cool.I really liked the setting of this one: a desolate, post-modern Paris is the backdrop with lots of gray skies and tall buildings. Very metropolitan. Groovy soundtrack and lots of nudity.Surprising it was made in 1980; seems somewhat ahead of it's time.8 out of 10, kids.