End of Days (1999)

It’s 1999, and instead of going to a proper party, Satan possesses the body of Gabriel Byrne and goes out to rape a particular young woman named Christine (Robin Tunney) – because thusly, the world is going to end, and Satan would win his game of cosmic whatever against God.

Some rogue (the film takes great pains to show the Pope disagrees) Catholics are trying to get in Satan’s way by simply murdering Christine. This, however, is not actually as easy as it sounds, particularly since mercenary bodyguard Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an alcoholic with a tragic dead family past, becomes involved, and starts protecting Christine from both sides. How centrist of him. So its’s Schwarzenegger against Satan and his gang and the churchy murder people, hooray.

Alas, poor Arnold. In a film like this bizarre mix of millennial horror and action movie, you really need to be able to utter the portentously idiotic lines Andrew W. Marlowe’s script offers with the proper dramatic weight. Schwarzenegger doesn’t appear to even understand what the hell he is saying most of the time, so all he’s left with are old action movie poses, an air of the overly chiselled slowly going to seed and utter confusion. Which isn’t enough when a movie demands actual acting from one to only be somewhat silly instead of completely ridiculous.

Everyone around Arnold knows what kind of film they are in, so Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney and even Kevin Pollak chew the scenery to various appropriate degrees, leaving our supposed star in the dust in a manner I found almost cruel.

House favourite director Peter Hyams doesn’t seem to be able to draw Schwarzenegger’s old limited yet effective charisma out either, and he’s clearly either not willing or not able to get the rest of the cast to make the poor guy look any better. Where’s Carl Weather’s when you need him? Because Hyams is Hyams, the action sequences are effective, efficient and absolutely competent, though they certainly aren’t the least bit inspired.

So as a viewer, all one is left with is the whole affair’s utter ridiculousness, the stupid but very funny dialogue, the confused mythology, Byrne’s absolutely shameless performance, and a lot of explosions.

Which certainly doesn’t make End of Days any kind of hidden gem, but a rather entertaining bit of nonsense despite of itself.

Three Films Make A Post: Just how far will a government go to hide the truth?

Defence of the Realm (1985): This British conspiracy thriller by David Drury makes an interesting contrast to comparable American films where journalism beats a government conspiracy in that the British view on journalists is much less heroic than the American one – at least once the 60s rolled in - often is. Which is what a press dominated by various models of scandal rags will do to one’s opinions. Our protagonist, wonderfully embodied by Gabriel Byrne, is a bit of a shit, perfectly willing to lie, cheat and probably steal, to then turn what he writes into melodrama; but as it turns out, he’s also – to his own surprise - unable to let the lies and injustices committed by those in power go, and turns heroic despite of himself. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a movie.

And it’s a bit of a classic, probably a bit slow-paced for many, I’d assume, but very good at portraying the process of research, and the looming understanding of how big and at once petty this thing that’s being violently suppressed actually is. Drury’s dry but effective direction works very well with the material, and the cast includes greats like Greta Scacchi, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen even in the smallest roles.

Bell Book and Candle (1958): For its first two thirds, Richard Quine’s fantastical romantic comedy is pretty much the sort of delight you’d expect this sort of thing to be, with so many clever script and staging ideas one can get a bit drunk watching it. Yet it also turns into a film that seems to be not too fond of its own supposed happy ending, something that equates romantic love with pain, and can see the process of an independent woman becoming part of a couple only in a way where the woman becomes lesser. There’s certainly a feminist perspective at the way this time and place treats women and romance buried rather shallowly in the film, but it’s also too conservative a thing (plus, a big studio movie from the late 50s) to go somewhere different than the times tell it to go.

Which leaves us with a film that tries selling a woman losing her magic, her fashion sense, and her taste in exchange for tears and fifty year old James Stewart as an actual happy end, something that leaves this heterosexual male viewer rather sceptical.

Death Comes at High Noon aka Døden kommer til middag (1964): If you want to look at it that way, you can find the influence of the giallo – or influences on the giallo – everywhere. Case in point is this Danish mystery directed by Erik Balling, where an amateur detective (Poul Reichhardt) – he’s a crime writer – stumbles upon a corpse and then a whole series of other crimes committed by a very honourable citizen indeed. Its political subtext, its stylish production, and the intense way Sander flirts with female lead Helle Virkner’s character – and vice versa, in a way that would have had contemporary censors in my native Germany screaming in horror – all seem to parallel developments elsewhere in European film while also having enough regional specificity to delight friends of the regionally specific like me.

In short: The Keep (1983)

1940. A troop of German soldiers under the command of Hautpmann Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow doing his usual “good German” shtick that has little to do with the atrocities the real Wehrmacht committed quite without SS help, but you know how it goes with these things) takes control of an ancient, and rather strange, keep in a Romanian mountain pass. Some greedy soldiers accidentally free an Ancient Evil™ from its captivity, and soon, said Evil is killing about one soldier a night. Woermann finds himself helpless to do anything against it.

Things don’t improve when SS major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) arrives with his men to “help out”. Carting in a Romanian, Jewish scholar (Ian McKellen) and his daughter (Alberta Watson) just before they’re deported into a concentration camp only provides the Evil with a useful Renfield. Fortunately for those parts of the world who aren’t fans of the whole evil thing, our AE does have an Ancient Enemy™, too. A certain Glaeken (Scott Glenn) slowly makes his way to Romania and just might get around to doing some good.

I’m what you’d generally see as a good candidate to appreciate Michael Mann’s The Keep (based on one of the few readable novels of the mostly insufferable libertarian F. Paul Wilson), as I’m the kind of guy who often sees no problems with films taking a “style over sense” approach. Of course, most of those films don’t make heavy, yet empty gestures towards saying something profound about the nature of “Evil”, and aren’t as dull as The Keep is.

Pretty the film sure is, though, with Tangerine Dreams’ ill-fitting soundtrack and Alex Thomson’s beautiful photography producing some fine picture postcards with sound. Alas that prettiness is completely at odds with the tone the film needs to have to actually reach the effect it is aiming at. It’s rather difficult to feel dread, or even become convinced of the existence of Evil when the film’s visuals have nothing whatsoever to do with these things. Mann’s type of artificiality as a director is the completely wrong one here too, completely missing the mark of the dream-like state the film needs to induce in its audience to work, given the vacuousness and just plain bad craftsmanship of a script that drags out the least important scenes until they feel as if they were going on forever, and barely finds time for the important stuff.

One might think the really rather wonderful cast might manage to salvage something out of the script’s mix of dullness and disinterest in the themes its supposedly about, but all performances are just as dull and lifeless, the unconvincing and uninteresting dialogue delivered in ways suggesting everyone involved was replaced by a life-sized manikin of themselves.

The resulting film has such an air of boredom surrounding it I’m not even interested enough to find out what went wrong during the course of The Keep’s production (because this surely can not be the film Mann actually wanted to make); I’m just glad it’s over and I won’t have to watch it again until I’ve forgotten how little I care for it.

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