The Keeper

In Redwood County, the dancer Gina (Asia Argento) is attacked and her boyfriend is killed by a maniac in a motel. Gina is attended by Sergeant Burns (Lochlyn Munro) and Lieutenant Krebs (Dennis Hopper) insists in giving a lift to her when she leaves the hospital. However, he kidnaps Gina and arrests her in a cell in the basement of his isolated house. The deranged policeman has a serious trauma from his childhood with dancers of night-clubs and establishes rules and punctuations for Gina while she is imprisoned. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Krebs is stalked by a local, Ruthie (Helen Shaver), who has a crush on him and wants to promote his amateurish puppet show with the character Deputy Rock, his alter-ego. Sgt. Burns is trying to find a clue where the missing Gina may be.

"The Keeper" is another predictable rip-off of William Wyler's "The Collector". This time, the captor is a deranged lieutenant and the captive is a dancer. The story entertains, but Dennis Hopper is too old and fat for the lead character. The heavy make-up on his face is highlighted in the image of the DVD. It is ridiculous the scene where a young dancer that is keeping her shape working-out in her cell is chased by an old fat man that is able to catch her. Today is a rainy day in Rio de Janeiro, and this movie was a reasonable choice for a boring afternoon. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Obsessão" ("Obsession")

Keeper, The (2004)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Lifeless thriller about a deranged cop (Dennis Hopper) who kidnaps a stripper (Asia Argento) and holds her hostage so that he can teach her how to be good. You'd think having Hopper play a nut and Argento a stripper that some magic would surface but that's not the case as this thriller lacks any suspense and instead enters the "so bad it's mildly entertaining" level. The badness of the screenplay and dialogue allows for plenty of unintentional laughs. Both Hopper and Argento are good in their roles but I really wish the screenplay had done more with their talents. The direction is pretty bad so this here is for fans of the actors only.

The reason for buying this DVD was that Dennis Hopper plays a lead role in the movie. Dennis Hopper is the kind of actor that can make a poor scenario work. One of the best parts he ever did was in True Romance, by Quentin Tarentino. The 10 minutes of his appearance in that movie are classic! The Keeper has some exciting parts that make up for the poor way (I think) in which the plot unravels... Why is deputy Burns sitting at a computer for hours with the same material on it??? The Keeper is an easy to watch movie and therefore simple entertainment. Because of the good acting by Dennis Hopper and Asia Argento I give this movie a 7-, although next time I want to see Dennis in a 10+ movie again!

It's truly odd how individuals who can't seem to master simple grammar and syntax will unabashedly critique a movie as if they have the cinematic genius of Roman Polanski.

If you fall into the category of viewer who thinks a film just isn't gosh darn entertaining unless things are "blown up real good", then by all means, give this one a pass. However if you don't spend your day breathing through your mouth and admiring your unibrow, then you will probably find this film to be the entertainment it aims to be.

If there's one type of role Dennis Hopper has down, it's that of a restrained nut job. And in this movie he gets to sink his teeth into the meaty role of a supreme nut job by playing a twisted small town sheriff who thinks he can convince a woman to fall in love with him by abducting her and locking her in a cell in his basement.

Heavily dialog driven, Hopper at times carries this film on his back with his highly compelling performance. Asia Argento, the daughter of Italian horror director Dario, is easy on the eyes and does a perfectly capable job in the role of the captive. Veteran Canadian actress Helen Shaver, surfaces as an equally unhinged groupie to Hopper's character, and her scenes with him eerily evoke fleeting similarities to that of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Canada's infamous serial killer couple.

The film is capably directed by Paul Lynch, who has made a career out of directing Canadian-filmed US television shows, something which isn't a leap considering that this film was shot in British Columbia.

Overall it's a pretty decent and entertaining little movie. It will hold you to the end and not leave you feeling ripped off. As for some of the other reviewers of this film, well, let's just say it's probably time that they changed the batteries in their singing wall-mounted fish and sat down to some more engaging entertainment.

The beginning of this movie really annoyed me. Asia Argento performs in a strip club, takes a shower, and nearly gets raped, all without actually having a nude scene! Don't get me wrong--even low-budget potboilers like this don't necessarily need nude scenes to be good, but it's annoying when a movie relentlessly teases the viewer with the promise of nudity but doesn't deliver (besides, it's not like Argento exactly has the pristine image of that other stripper-who-doesn't-strip, Natalie Portman--she's done nude scenes in movies directed by her FATHER, and supposedly had unsimulated sex on screen in her own directorial effort "Scarlet Diva").

After the beginning though this movie wasn't THAT bad. For once, we have a movie with a believable stalker in Dennis Hopper. It's really stupid how in Hollywood movies stalkers always seem to be young, beautiful women (Erica Christensen, Rebecca DeMornay, Alicia Silverstone, ad infinitum), the people who in real life are much more likely to be the ones being stalked. And Hopper's performance as "Deputy Rock" is uncharacteristically subdued and psychologically nuanced. He isn't primarily interested in Argento for sex (although that element is there), but keeps her in a cage in what he views as an effort to protect her. He really is the straight-arrow cop he appears to be, just to a completely psychotic extent. I also liked Lochlyn Munro as the good guy cop and Helen Shaver as the woman producing an anti-drug show with Deputy Rock (who turns out to be just as crazy as he is). Which brings us back to Argento, who is probably the weakest link here, but she's certainly not awful. It's refreshing, for instance, that while she eventually fights back, she doesn't completely turn into the butt-kicking babe dispatching the villain with a stupid one-liner (a stereotype every bit as annoying as the old-fashioned "damsel in distress"--and even more unrealistic). Her character obviously feels morally compromised as a stripper and rape victim even before she's taken prisoner, and she has to overcome this as well as her captor. Argento can believably play a morally compromised character better than most big-name American actresses, so she's well suited for the role at least (even if she never does get around to actually taking her clothes off).