Bonehead-XL Opening on the beach that must be familiar even to casual Jean Rollin fans, "The Iron Rose" might be the director's most acclaimed film. It's a very pure movie, with an even more simplistic story then you'd expect, not a single naked vampire in sight. Two lovers meet at a Halloween party. The next day they go for a train ride and end up in an old cemetery. While making love in a crypt, the gates are closed and the two are locked in.At night, the cemetery becomes an otherworldly place. There is no escape. The boy searches helplessly for an exit while the girl quickly goes mad. She warms up to the idea of death, holding a skull up over her face, laughing. Earlier, the boy falls into an open grave, the camera spinning around him as he looks up as his girlfriend. The two characters represent conflicting ideologies. Early on, they discuss religion, the boy being a strict non-believer while the girl isn't sure. After the madness sets in, she accepts death as a natural thing. He fears it, rebels against it. Given the fixed location and small cast, the movie plays more like an allegory the longer it goes on."The Iron Rose" has gorgeous Gothic atmosphere. The cemetery is a fantastic setting, with its huge gravestones, looming crosses, dusty crypts, and cobweb strewn statues. The film is based off a poem, which explains the dreamy tone, but the graveyard had to have been the real inspiration. How could anyone resist making a horror film in this setting? The sparse music is composed of whispering voices. The only moment of unintentional camp comes when the girl opens her mouth to releases an odd, unconvincing scream.It's a good thing the movie looks so good because the story is a drag. After night falls, the film breaks down into a clear pattern. Guy tries to escape, girl rambles on, guy's attempts are frustrated, repeat. Unusual for Rollin, the film is dialogue-heavy, many semi-poetic monologues about life and death being batted around. Both characters are slightly annoying, the girl coming off as manic and the guy coming off as kind of a jerk. Honestly, the best moments are the ones that have the least to do with the couple. A sad clown drags a handful of roses through the gravestones. An old woman leaves a flower pot on a crypt door. The girl frolics on a beach in the nude, pushing over iron crosses. I suspect this would have made a fine short, given its fantastic setting, images, and nicely poetic ending. As a feature, it quickly becomes repetitive. I maintain that Rollin's goofier, vampire-filled, nudity-and-imagery driven films are his best.

Robert J. Maxwell Two happy young lovers explore first an empty train then an empty cemetery in a cold and misty atmosphere. They find an underground crypt entered by ladder through two iron flaps. They strip and make love standing up. Already it's a horror movie. Who can make love standing up in an icy crypt? Only in a horror movie.There's no point in going on about the plot because there is no discernible plot. It's as if the cast and crew were given a night to film in a shabby thanatopolis and made up stuff as they went along.I gather -- okay, I'll take a stab at it -- I gather that the pretty young girl goes mad. For some reason, after a night full of meandering and arguing, they come across that same crypt. The boy, for some reason, goes down into it again and invites the girl to join him, where they'll be "safe." Instead, she clangs the trap doors close and locks him in. He shouts that he's suffocating, but she ignores him.She wanders off with an enigmatic smile. She props one foot against a tombstone and uses it as a barre, then dancing off among the graves and administrative buildings, humming to herself while doing grotesque gavottes. This wordless, pointless scene lasts a full ten minutes.When dawn peeps through the drab sky into the withered weeds and frozen marble of the grave yard, she returns to the crypt, opens it, climbs down to join her deceased lover, and slams the iron doors closed.The general atmosphere is enough to make anyone climb into the crypt and suffocate, and the dialog -- if that's what it is -- amounts to writer-assisted suicide. "My darling, your fingers are burning. The rose is of iron. Why do we fear the living? They only decay." I tried to read some social or moral message into this rarefied baloney but failed completely. Since the movie is as amorphous as a Rorschach ink blot, anybody can read anything they want into it, I suppose. Maybe it's really very relevant and meaningful. Maybe it's all my fault. Honestly. Because every time I see one of those ink blots, no matter which one, it always looks like the face of Bette Midler.

matheusmarchetti 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.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) I'm a delightfully reformed proto-Goth who used to take great solace on barren nights back in my college days by securing a healthy dose of alcohol, couple of smokes, a bag of Andy Capp cheddar fries and then off to the cemetery with my Tom Waits tape at about 2:30 AM. If you listened carefully you could hear me singing drunkenly about being in the cold, cold ground ... There was something quietly reassuring about being there, knowing that you weren't exactly alone and if you minded your P's and Q's the dead might actually enjoy the company, and a moonlight serenade.Eventually I grew out of the phase but if there is one thing that I did know during that time it was to NEVER bring a date to the cemetery. I know for a fact that the world is populated by gormless Goth chicks who get into the whole death trip & have a macabre side to them that might make it conducive to try scoring with them amid the tombs (and will probably love this movie). But see, the cemetery was a place for peaceful solitary reflection, and at the time was relatively safe since nobody in their right minds would walk out into a cemetery at 2 in the morning to look for someone to mess with.So right away in Jean Rollin's NIGHT IN THE CEMETERY (which is a much better title than ROSE OF IRON) the guy blows it when he picks a dalliance in a local overgrown run down French cemetery as the place to bring a young lady he meets at a wedding party. Not exactly the brightest bulb in the lighthouse mind you, but she's a fetching lass and he gets to score with her down in a crypt that just happens to be unlocked. Later, they realize it's gotten dark outside and they find themselves lost within a cemetery that actually looks like several bone yards that have been combined into one using clever cross cutting.This is actually where the film gets interesting, because there literally is no end to the place. It's also wonderfully overgrown with rusted iron fencing, crumbling monuments and statues. But it's also about here that they start going a bit batty, the girl in particular. She starts to imagine herself as being at one with the dead and preferring their quiet, peaceful non- existence to the hustle & bustle of modern day life. Which is exactly the point of hanging out in the cemetery in the first place, though you'd think they would have brought plenty of extra booze and some Tom Waits.Eventually she goes completely to pieces and decides that death is more favorable than life itself. The two find themselves back in the tomb which becomes suddenly airless and capped off by an old woman's vase of flowers. The whole movie is like a weird, perverse nightmare complete with a scene where the pair copulate on a pile of bones in an open mass grave. Others are right on the money when they comment that not much happens in the film and I for one actually wish that even less happened. There is a languid, poetic nature to the proceedings that are wonderfully lyrical in their juxtaposition of death & decay next to young fleshy breasts. How come people can't make movies like this anymore? The one thing I kept thinking of was how you simply couldn't make a movie like this in 2008 no matter how you tried. There would need to be a subplot about gangsters or a love rival, maybe a car chase and a couple of big special effects sequences where the ghosts rise up to dance with the young lady as she frolics amidst the headstones. Jean Rollin is not my favorite of directors and this isn't quite my favorite of his films -- try FRISSONS LES VAMPIRES for some real fireworks -- but it's got something going on that's quite unique even amongst his catalog of work. He knew what he was after here and got it, pure and simple. There's something to be admired in that.7/10