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Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A brooding young man (a solid performance by Hugues Quester) meets a gorgeous and beguiling young woman (well played with great subtlety and understated intuition by the lovely Francoise Pascal) at a wedding ceremony. The pair decide to go on a date in a cemetery. However, come nightfall the couple find themselves trapped in the graveyard and soon succumb to panic when the pervasive hopelessness of their dismal situation overwhelms them. Deliberately paced, graced by plenty of strikingly bizarre moments (a vampire returning to his crypt, a melancholy clown placing flowers on a grave, etc.), and given a real substantial extra impact and potency by a powerfully spooky and unsettling midnight-in-the-boneyard gloom-doom atmosphere that positively drips with a strong feeling of dread, despair, and madness, writer/director Jean Rollin's unusual and intriguing cinematic meditation on life, love, death, and mortality possesses a dreamy, lyrical, and elegant quality which makes watching this movie a truly hypnotic experience. Jean-Jacques Renon's beautiful cinematography offers a wealth of stunningly surreal visuals while Pierre Raph's shivery score hits the marrow-chilling spot. An exquisitely macabre and singular celluloid tone poem.

More than a few European horror directors in the 70's went on to do hardcore pornography, and Jean Rollin in no exception. What differs him from the likes of Joe D'Amato, however, is that Rollin was a real, though neglected craftsman, and possibly one of France's finest auteurs. He injects each and every one of his horror films (save for "Zombie Lake", which is as much a Jess Franco film as Tobe Hooper's "Poltergeist" is a Steven Spielberg film) with such relentless atmosphere of death prowling every inch of the frame, and "The Rose of Iron" is where he excels. One of the finest poets of all things morbid and decadent - think the cinematic equivalent of Edgar Allan Poe, Rollin creates a minimalist, lyrical, unusual and disorienting beautiful ode to Death, that save for very few exceptions, has never been bettered elsewhere in the genre. The fairly simplistic, but multi-layered plot follows a young couple getting trapped in a cemetery after-hours, unable to find the way out as the girl slowly succumbs to madness. "The Rose of Iron" is a difficult film and thus not for everyone, as even Rollin fans might find themselves disappointed, as there is none of his trademark vampire girl-on-girl action nor is there the slightest bit of gore and camp. Nudity is minimal, and so is the cast, composed of only two actors for nearly it's entirety, with only one setting. Nevertheless, what one can simply describe as boring and uninteresting, I find be a cerebral, hypnotic tour-de-force, that keeps you glued to the screen from beginning to end, if you're willing to be bewitched by it's atypical quality. Although most Euro-horrors of it's time were criticized for poor acting, "Rose..." proves otherwise by having brilliant performances from Françoise Pascal and Hugues Quester as the young couple. They are one of the few Rollin performers who actually manage to enjoy a more successful career in French cinema, and rightfully so. They manage to carry the film brilliantly, even with the limited and often surrealistic dialogue. Quester evokes a genuine sense of paranoia as the film progresses, and Pascal's spiral descent into insanity is equally raw and visceral, in spite of the film's otherworldly nature. Pascal's acceptance and consequent embracing of the world of the dead very much represents Jean Rollin's own utopia - a twilight world that transcends time and space, where both the living and the deceased live among one another, to the point they become one. Rollin's passion for crumbling, ancient grounds also mirrors this ideal dreamland, and he makes the best out of this often-used setting, bringing it to life through some delirious camera-work that would make Argento envious, and an equally foreboding, experimental musical score by Pierre Raph. Overall, if you dare give yourself up to the unique, morbidly beautiful dream-world of France's most underrated filmmaker, "The Rose of Iron" is the film for you.

I'd normally consider myself a fan of Jean Rollin, The Shiver Of The Vampire ranks up there as one of my all-time favourite horror movies, and I have very fond memories of other Rollin movies as well. I was shocked by the low-quality of this. It sounds like something that might have been a good idea, but it ended up rubbish.The girl playing the lead role is quite sexy and seems as though she could be a good actress if she wasn't given such a ridiculous part. The male on the other hand can't act at all. Those are basically the only two people in the entire film. Some of the imagery is fairly good, along with the music. If they had those good bits and hacked together the rest of the film sanely, THEN I might have given it a 3/4. But as it stands, some of the film is excruciating and again... NOTHING REALLY HAPPENS! It's not that I don't appreciate it, it's boring! Okay I'll admit that sometimes sitting down to watch a Jess Franco or Italian horror, I'm a bit concerned I'll be completely bored by it. With just over an hour and a quarter and directed by Jean Rollin I never dreamt it would be this bad. I doubt he ever made a worse film, for me this is right up there with Zombie Lake. The film involves the couple walking through a cemetery while lost, getting scared, increasingly fighting and the girl increasing losing her head. I honestly don't know how anyone can give this movie even a decent rating or how any other Jean Rollin movie could be worse than this. Yeah there's a case for difference of opinion but what's so great about a girl dancing ridiculously through a graveyard for what seems like an eternity? Look at Requiem For A Vampire, that had longer and far more beautiful takes and it never got boring.The good pieces in this movie were few and far between, it was a truly dreadful hour and a quarter. The music could be good at times... the scenery was quite good at times... and those are the only decent things I can say about this movie. Stay well away!

Jean Rollin is best known for his lesbian vampire films. I have seen five of said films and all of them were rubbish. If The Iron Rose were another lesbian vampire flick, I would never have seen it; but strangely, the non-lesbian vampire efforts I've seen from Jean Rollin (The Living Dead Girl, The Grapes of Wrath) were quite good so I figured maybe his work outside of his favourite genre might be decent, but on the strength of this film; I have to say that I think I was wrong! The Iron Rose takes the atmosphere from Rollin's lesbian vampire flicks (often the best attribute) and fuses it with a bizarre plot that sees a couple trapped in a graveyard. Nothing about the film makes any sense; the way they meet is unlikely, the way they get to the graveyard is stupid and what happens in the graveyard is pointless. Rollin was clearly trying to make some sort of sexy/surreal drama but what we end up with instead is a load of depressing nonsense. The location shots are nice, with the graveyard itself being a particularly outstanding place to set a horror movie with its Gothic gravestones and foreboding atmosphere so it's a shame that Rollin couldn't make more out of it. The film feels like it should have some profound and deep message but if it did, it's buried so far under the boredom that I wouldn't know where to start looking for it. The film is also poorly edited and badly shot, the latter point being a major shame considering that the graveyard is really the only good thing about it. Overall, I can't recommend anyone sees this film; mercifully it is quite short at seventy five minutes, but that is seventy five minutes that could be better spent elsewhere. Avoid!