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.

I cannot claim to be a connoisseur of the man's work so far, but personally I do not even nearly understand the enthusiasm that many of my fellow Eurohorror/cult fans seem to have about the films of Jean Rollin. Since this film is not one of his countless lesbian vampire flicks, but supposedly a Gothic chiller that many of Rollin's fans seem to regard as his masterpiece, I was looking forward to the film. Sadly, "La Rose De Fer" aka. "Rose of Iron" (1973) turned out one of the most nonsensical and insufferably boring European Horror productions (if one can even call it Horror). At least Rollin's lesbian vampire films were entertaining and made up for a lack of substance with gratuitous female nudity. "La Rose De Fer" is almost event-less. In one aspect, however, the film is phenomenal: The film is fantastically shot in a an old cemetery, which is arguably one of the most beautiful, eeriest and most fascinating Horror settings of all time. The film is visually overwhelming, thanks to this fantastic setting and a beautiful photography. Yet, a mesmerizing setting is no excuse for making a film in which NOTHING happens! The film begins when a creepy-looking guy and a pretty girl fall in love and make arrangements to go bike-riding the next day. They stop at an old cemetery, fail to find their way out and get locked in. As night falls, both of them begin to act strangely (or should I say: annoyingly)...As said above, the film's setting is fantastic, eerie, and unspeakably beautiful, and I would certainly like to visit the depicted cemetery some day. This is arguably why so many people seem to love this film - it is visually flawless, the trees and the beautiful tombstones and grave statues create a wonderful, fairy-tale-like atmosphere. The stunning visual style may overwhelm, but I cannot imagine whose attention it is going to uphold for the length of a film. "La Rose De Fer" is only 77 minutes long, and yet it seems endless, since there are no real events, just a compilation of weird, but nonetheless boring nonsensical sequences. Everything the protagonists say is nonsense, everything they do is nonsense, and the fact that the nonsense takes place in a great setting only makes up for a tiny part of the boredom. There is no suspense, no blood and very little nudity to make up for the lack of a plot. The film is apparently based on a poem by Tristan Cobìere, which may be the reason that people call it 'poetic'. "La Rose De Fer" may be watched for the stunning visual style, but its lack of events makes it one of the most boring affairs I ever sat through. In fact, it took me three takes to watch the complete film since I fell asleep twice. I'm giving it a rating of 3 out of 10 ONLY for the fantastic visual style, otherwise the film is a disaster.

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!

The beginning of the film - deserted town and railway station sequences are a delight. When the characters eventually enter the cemetery, 'The Iron Rose' gets somehwat tedious, with the heroes merely wondering amid the tombstones, uttering nonsensical lines from time to time. There's little for them to do there. The film was clearly made purely out of Rollin's love for cemetery ambiance,its decay and desolation: multiple shots of crosses and tombstones, strange characters who don't understand each other. Conversations they have lead nowhere and end abruptly. Rollin populates the cemetery with his favourite heroes: a vampire is seen entering the crypt, and a creepy clown bringing some flowers to one of the graves. The acting is rather questionable, also because the script doesn't provide the leads who actually seem to be quite capable actors, with any material to work with. Therefore their behaviour in the film seems really weird as they switch from nearly catatonic state to mad fury for no reason and then become mild and gentle again within seconds. Rollin never ever tells conventional stories with his films, instead he just films what he wants to see, and then puts it together in editing, as a result his subconscious is on display. There's no such thing as pace in his films, he doesn't try an give his films rhythm and structure via editing, he only uses it to put the scenes together (hence the frequent jarring cuts in most of his works). The director's aim is to put you in a particular mood, not to deliver some concrete message. Atmosphere is his ultimate aim, for Rollin admits his films are moving paintings. I was disappointed when I first watched the film, but I rewatch it often. Although lacking any dramatic tension, 'The Iron Rose' is a very beautiful and atmospheric film.