La rose de fer
Tags: insanity, cult, psychedelic, gothic

Plot synopsis:
A young woman and man meet at a wedding reception and arrange a date. They meet at a railway station and go for a picnic and bike ride. They arrive at the entrance of a lonely cemetery and go inside.
Once inside the huge cemetery, the woman becomes anxious. The man calms her and persuades her to enter a crypt with him. A strange man watches the couple. The man and the woman make love in the crypt. A clown places some flowers on a nearby grave and leaves. An old woman closes the cemetery gates.
When the couple finally exit the crypt, night has fallen and they cannot find their way out. They begin to panic. They discover a small building; inside are several child-sized coffins holding small skeletons. The woman becomes moody and exhibits bizarre behavior and personality changes. She locks her lover in the crypt and he suffocates. Dawn finds the woman dancing around the cemetery, and later entering the crypt herself. The old woman reopens the cemetery gates. Finding the crypt closed, she puts flowers on top of it.

Review: La Rose De Fer (the Iron Rose) is one of the most sensual and beautiful horror films I've ever seen.
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.
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.
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.
Although lacking any dramatic tension, 'The Iron Rose' is a very beautiful and atmospheric film..
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.
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.
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..
He claims the film was inspired by a real life incident.Rollin refers to Rose of Iron as an art film.
As time progresses, fear gives way to madness.There is much to recommend this film.
Rose of Iron seems very much like a cautionary tale of old as opposed to a straight forward horror film.
The films drips with dark atmospheric, from the morbid poet who charms the female lead, to the foggy and creepy aesthetics of locations such as the train yard and the graveyard.The plot navigates around a young man falling for a pretty girl, they meet at party where his poetry (need I remind you that not all poetry is rose are red) wins him the attention of an attractive girl.
Rose of Iron is at the very least, a very enigmatic film.A purely psychological horror, with few actual elements of the supernatural.
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.
At least Rollin's lesbian vampire films were entertaining and made up for a lack of substance with gratuitous female nudity.
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 begins when a creepy-looking guy and a pretty girl fall in love and make arrangements to go bike-riding the next day.
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 Rose of Iron" is easily one of the most hauntingly beautiful horror flicks made by French maestro Jean Rollin.The film tells the story of a young couple,who venture into a very old and very large cemetery,eventually getting lost within it's walls.Throughout this time,a mind game between the two arises and begins to battle.Eventually Francoise Pascal's character adopts to her surroundings."The Rose of Iron" is a wonderfully Gothic mood piece,which is primarily set in a cemetery.The film is loaded with hauntingly dark atmosphere of utter hopelessness and there are some surreal situations for example lonely clown walking through the cemetery corridors.Give this lovingly poetic horror flick a look.9 out of 10..
They have sex in a tomb and when they are ready to leave the night has put its dark cloak over the place and they can't find their way out.Somehow 'La rose de fer' aka 'The Iron Rose' took me back to my childhood when the dead seemed a lot more present than they are now.
Looking at the sinister beauty of the cemetery that holds her captive and the iron rose she finds she apparently figures that death is the way of everything, it far outlasts life and it even has beauty going for it.
From the point of view of a human being stone and iron are practically eternal.The unquestionable star of the show is the apparently HUGE, old, unkempt cemetery with a forest-like autumn vegetation.
But that's exactly what the characters do and it does look like the real thing.Before 'The Iron Rose' gets to that location however we have a pre-credit sequence which shows the girl on Jean Rollin's favorite beach.
The girl later finds an identical iron rose on the cemetery and at one point she fantasizes about being on the same beach (this time with a bunch of iron crosses standing around) when she's actually still on the cemetery.To me the most poignant but wonderfully subtle connection is made in a little scene in which the boy suddenly stops walking and says relieved to the girl: "Can you hear?
So while 'The Iron Rose' certainly doesn't newly define night shooting it still looks pretty good and atmospherically the visuals work too.This gem is different in many ways to the other Rollin films I've seen.
The film involves the couple walking through a cemetery while lost, getting scared, increasingly fighting and the girl increasing losing her head.
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.
Most of these people are my fellow moronic Americans with the attention spans of gnats and the intelligence of rocks.If you're looking for a horror movie and you pick this up, you probably wont like this, and that I can actually understand, it helps to know of this movie going in.
Its different, doesn't have blood or gore, and very little nudity with no lame, constant music.If you actually read books, understand that there was a decade called the 1970s and films looked different then (because no digital technology existed), and also understand there are people and places that exist outside of 'merica (in this case a French couple in a European cemetery), then you might be able to like this movie.If you are a fan of Rollin, then you do need to see this too.
I had really high hopes that "The Rose of Iron" would be Jean Rollin's absolute BEST film and finally something different than those stupid lesbian-vampire films he always makes.
Dig this: a beautiful girl falls head over heels in love with a bizarre guy after he reads a morbid poem to her during some party where none of the guests seem to know each other.
The next day, the young couple agrees to bike riding near an abandoned and ominous looking train-station Okay, maybe a bit eccentric, but still acceptable.
The graveyard where 90% of the movie takes place is probably the most macabre filming location in horror-history ever.
A young couple gets lost at a country churchyard one night and lots of panic, statues and typical Rollin-doomed romanticism follows.
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 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.
No lesbian vampires in sight, but still not a good film from Jean Rollin!.
Jean Rollin is best known for his lesbian vampire films.
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.
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.
A young horny couple go to what must be one of the largest cemeteries in France for a bit of hanky panky during the day but end up getting locked in after dark & struggle to find their way back out.
Unusual for a Rollin film of this time there are no vampires to be found, instead this film centres around fear, sex obviously & a poem.
There's also a lot of pretty fun sequences running through the whole landscape, but the main problem here is the very over-done and incredibly irritating manner of yakking on about everything with a very philosophical manner, almost like it's an art film instead of a sleazy horror film which continues throughout the whole film and gets old very fast, and combines with the slow, dragged-out pace to lower it but otherwise this isn't that bad of a film.Rated Unrated/R: Adult Language, Full Nudity and Mild Violence..
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.
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..
First they visit what appears to be a graveyard for old steam trains (a joy for the train spotters I should think), then off to the local cemetery, because it is quiet.The girl is somewhat scared when he wants to enter a tomb, and he seems to enjoy this.
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.
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.
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.
Like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (one of the greatest if most often underrated vampire movies ever made), ROSE OF IRON is a quiet, subtle little exercise in terror.
They decide to have a small picnic inside a cemetery and are so drawn to each other sexually, that the couple will seek out a warm spot to make love..that being an underground crypt(..yes, certainly a bit morbid, but just wait until the next place they find for a make-out session).
The young woman, in the opening of the film, found a peculiar iron rose in the ocean of a beach.
A love affair between the young female and the cemetery blossoms as we watch her orchestrate balletic movement throughout the grounds, embracing death now fully conceived as the only true way towards happiness.Now, I do realize a film such as this will certainly frustrate many, but I found it stunning.
While the plot is simple, I felt Rollin's goal was to embrace the macabre atmosphere of the cemetery in every way possible.
To be honest, I can't think of a better location to set a horror film than in a graveyard with those ancient tombstones, dying railings, rusty gates that screech and moan, & deteriorating crucifixes lining the grounds as masses of shrubbery and night invade and engulf.
Rollin's camera lovingly captures the female actress in shots around angel statues that have seen better days, holding skulls, gently caressing her iron rose, and dancing in a state of bliss throughout the cemetery..even when she's lost to insanity, her beauty glistens.
Some haunting dream-like shots of the cemetery as dawn begins to appear, the ocean with the naked female lead and her rose, etc.
The most morbid and wild scene in the film, I believe, is the one where the couple make out in a burial pit of scattered skulls and bones, the male lead fell into while trying, in a state of panic, to find his way out.
Various interlopers walking the grounds during the daytime(each a little wink from Rollin such as the sad clown dragging his flowers toward the grave of a loved one or a familiar vampire barely glimpsed entering a crypt)add some bonus oddness to this Gothic extravaganza.
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.
I had recorded it late at night from TCM.It's categorized as a "horror" film by the IMDb. The story involves a young couple who meet at a wedding noticing each other across the room.
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.
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.
While making love in a crypt, the gates are closed and the two are locked in.At night, the cemetery becomes an otherworldly place.
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.
How could anyone resist making a horror film in this setting?
I maintain that Rollin's goofier, vampire-filled, nudity-and-imagery driven films are his best..
"Rose of Iron" (1973) is a film I was not familiar at all.
I guess the director was trying to leave it up to the viewer of the film: does the young woman simply go mad out of fright, or is she possessed by some spirit?
Like a horror film made by Buñuel...and a bit slow..
Here in "Rose of Iron", a young couple enters a cemetery for some sex (an odd place for this, I know) and when they are done they are unable to find their way out despite trying all night.Here in "Rose of Iron" it just seems to go on a bit too long--like it would have been better left as a short segment in an anthology film or ending it sooner.