Product Details

• Actors: Brigitte Lahaie, Vincent Gardère, Dominique Journet, Bernard Papineau, Rachel Mhas
• Directors: Jean Rollin
• Writers: Jean Rollin
• Producers: Monique Samarcq
• Format: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: All Regions
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: April 27, 1999
• Run Time: 87 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6305340382
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,757 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Night of the Hunted" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Euro-horror cult director Jean Rollin dives into science fiction with an ultra-low-budget picture that resembles nothing less than Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor by way of David Cronenberg. Though it starts out in classic horror fantasy fashion, with a beautiful young woman (Rollin regular Brigitte Lahaie) in a flimsy nightgown rushing breathlessly though a dark forest, the imagery quickly changes tone when she is returned to the mysterious, antiseptic skyscraper asylum known as "Black Tower." Blank-eyed inmates with dissipated memories wander through the featureless white hallways and empty rooms, helpfully making up stories for one another to stand in for their lost pasts. Like in most of Rollin's films, the story is more fascinating before the exposition and explanations, when the ambiguous conspiracies and the stark landscapes create an unsettling, alienated world out of time and place. The wooden acting is transformed into an asset, a dazed cast of shuffling living zombies somewhere between shock and stupor slowly losing their minds. In true Rollin fashion, he takes time out for gratuitous sex scenes and nudity and weaves a disconnected series of gory murders into a story that never really makes sense in the first place, but the ethereal, poetic imagery creates an enigmatic psychodrama more concerned with mood and texture than narrative. The new Redemption release restores two scenes cut by the producers for its theatrical release. The DVD features the theatrical trailer and a gallery of production stills. --Sean Axmaker

Product Description

Stylish, futuristically surreal and a departure from director Jean Rollin's familiar vampire territory, "The Night of the Hunted" features a mass of people suffering with insanity and collective amnesia. Bizarre, even by Rollin's standards, it still displays fairy tale qualities mixed with extremes of sadism, sex and violence. Restored from the original negative.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Is this Cronenberg or Lynch?, July 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Night of the Hunted (DVD)

Jean Rollin's film will definetly appeal to fans of the above named directors. It has a surreal, dreamlike quality that consistently keeps the viewer guessing as to what is going on. The story is one of lost identity, paranioa and inescapable fate, that one will remember long after viewing. The DVD is thankfully subtitled rather than dubbed and the actors voice inflections during crucial scenes help attain the atmosphere of dread. Be warned that the film contains graphic, probably x-rated sex scenes and strong violence. If you are looking for something different, give it a try.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A poem of the pulp imagination, December 11, 2005

By 

Jeffrey Ellis "bored recluse" (Richardson, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Night of the Hunted (DVD)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brigitte Lahaie in an unexpectedly compassionate role., June 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Night of the Hunted [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Most fans know Brigitte Lahaie as the French adult films actress who earned a cult following through her work for director Jean Rollin in erotic horror films like "Fascination." But in "Night of the Hunted" she gives an unexpectedly compassionate performance in a film with the requisite gore and nudity, but also real emotional impact. For a free catalog of Ms. Lahaie's rare French horror and adult films, send your full mailing address to [e-mail]