Great Film overall

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Film begins at same seaside locations as Rollin's own The Rape of the Vampire, giving a familiar, yet alien, look to the landscape, as a guy and girl meet, followed by eerie images of the girl in bright yellow walking in fog-enshrouded fields, and next to a huge freight train, enveloped in a thick cloud of fog.The film takes its time setting up the premise, as the bored guy and girl walk aimlessly through beaches and train yards, and ultimately, a cemetery. A beautiful Gothic cemetery, peopled by a surreal clown, and caretakers cloaked in what appear to be burlap sacks.Unlike Rollin's earlier black-and-white The Rape of The Vampire, which used its black-and-white photography to build atmosphere, this could not have worked in black-and-white: good colour composition of the girl in bright yellow and the guy in bright red turtleneck, to set them apart from the grey surroundings of the cemetery, and surreal images of clown walking around and laying flowers on graveside needed colour photography for the characters to stand out from surroundings.After nightfall, when they are finished banging, they try to leave the cemetery. No easy task, with this guy. They stumble onto open graves, coffins littered with human bones, as they try to find their way out. But are they really lost? Or is the guy just f 'ing with her? And does he, too, become as scared as she is, which only makes her even more scared? Or is she, herself, behind everything? Bear with it through its slow start, it doesn't really get going until about 25 minutes into it, and even then, there really isn't anywhere for it to go. It's a good movie, in a bewildering, Jean Rollin type of way, but I think it would have benefited from a shorter run time.

Iron Rose, The (1973) *** (out of 4) A man (Hugues Quester) and woman (Francoise Pascal) meet at a wedding reception and sneak off to talk where they agree to meet the next day for a bike ride. The two ride past a cemetery and decide to enter so that they can have sex in an underground tomb but when they come up it is now dark and they soon find themselves lost and unable to get out. This is considered by many to be the best film Rollin ever made and I might not disagree. The film has received a big cult following over the years and the strange thing is that it has been sold as a horror film but there's no horror anywhere in the film. This is certainly an art house film and a departure for Rollin as there are no vampires, zombies, lesbians, gore and even the sex is tame and there's only one sequence of nudity. The film runs 75-minutes and not too much happens in that time. The two just walk around trying to find their way out while their minds start to be filled with paranoia. The film is very slow paced like every other Rollin film but this works in the films favor. The cinematography is terrific and they used a real cemetery to shoot in, which adds great atmosphere. I think the final eight minutes could have been edited down but this is certainly a surreal little gem.

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.