The Keep

I wish that Mann had been a more experienced director when he tackled this really bizarre film, but all things considered it is really a damn fine movie. The soundtrack has some problems, but the dialogue and acting are so interesting that the faults of the film are balanced out. I especially enjoyed the conversations between Byrne's SS Major and Prochnow's German Army Captain. In fact, I almost wish that the majority of the film had dealt with this rather than the bizarre supernatural stuff. I really do advise this film to anyone that is interested in strange cinema. If you can get past the unfortunate flaws of the film, I think you will notice that it is actually a kind of fascinating little movie. I have seen it many times (first back in '85) and still find it a good watch (although most of my friends do not). In other words, this movie is not for everyone, but I thought it is quite interesting.

A few of a detachment of German Army soldiers are mysteriously murdered in a Romanian citadel - 1942. The SS arrives to investigate and put a stop to the killings. However, there is an evil force at work within the Keep which will do anything to escape.

The Keep is a high concept yarn. The initial find set up and shooting of the villagers are stand out moments. The visuals and effects are stylistic, strong lighting, wind machines, optical layers are very much of there day. The special make-up has a startling 'cool' look to it, the 'Molasar' and Trismegestus designs are particularly well executed. Notably are the cast which includes the likes of Gabriel Byrne and Robert Prosky. Jürgen Prochnow is on fine form as Captain Klaus Woermann, Scott Glenn is intense and Ian McKellen is memorable as Dr. Theodore Cuza. The sets are well crafted, the on location shoot adds credence to the WWII setting and costumes add to the believability.

Nevertheless, rather than being intriguing with a slow pace The Keep plods along without building any real tension or suspense. The editing is a little jumbled, it appears to be a mixture of good and bad takes leaving it somewhat disjointed especially in the final reel, it may have benefited from only using those 'good' takes with a shorter running time. Tangerine Dream's score is of its time but doesn't compliment the scenes, it's highly intrusive and takes away much of the atmosphere, subtlety and eeriness.

Even with director Michael Mann at the helm and given the excellent story based on F. Paul Wilson's novel and Mann's adequate screenplay it never gels together. It's not sure whether it wants to be an art house, MTV video piece or gritty supernatural. Should Mann had attempted this recently he may have been able to fuse it together satisfyingly. I suppose retrospect is a fine thing. Curiously, Mann's workprint ran for 3 hours, after the studio saw what he had they wanted it cut to no longer than 90 minutes and assigned it second-level advertising. Mann has since distanced himself from the film.

Through all its disjointedness The Keep is an interesting film with a strong mythical good versus evil theme that plays on old religious fables. Molasar (Michael Carter) is the most menacing evil entity/being ever committed to celluloid and it's a shame that this has fallen into obscurity robbing the character and The Keep of even cult status.

Romania, the Carpathian Alps, 1942. In this European backwater, a squad of German troops, led by Captain Woermann, occupy an isolated hamlet, with orders to guard the mountain pass. They enshrine themselves in the vast, lowering, Gothic Keep which overshadows the whole valley. Some of the troops make no attempt to disguise their boredom, and despite the warnings from the odd, reticent 'caretaker', it isn't long before two of the restless soldiers prise open part of the keep's heavily fortified interior, seeking their fortune. What they find is something else entirely other… One-by-one a malevolent force murders the men, and the beleaguered Woermann asks for re-location – but instead gets a squad of bloodthirsty SS troops, hell-bent on ferreting out the supposed 'partisan' threat. The local priest forces them to pursue a more investigative, by saying that a scholar, Dr. Cuza, might be able to shed some light on the keep's origins… Cuza, who is summoned with his beautiful daughter in tow, is Jewish. Meanwhile, a mysterious mariner, awakened from afar by a change in the earth, crosses land and sea to get to the keep.

And thus the stage is set for WW2 and man's various grievances and foibles to be played out in mythic miniature. The Keep was Michael Mann's second theatrical feature after Thief, his third if you count (the terrific) Jericho Mile. It pretty much flopped on its original release, and interest in the film is pretty small. There's been the odd screening on TV, a small VHS release in the UK in the early 2000s (when I first saw it), a big fan website being started up, run by a Mr. Stephane Pieter, the odd rep screening, and also a comic book drawn by Matthew Smith. However, the film's hard-to-find nature and its overwhelming oddness in the Mann canon has worked against it. Paramount pictures don't seem to have a great deal of enthusiasm for their film, so it isn't out on DVD yet. Furthermore, the writer of the novel, F. Paul Wilson, has never made any attempt to hide his disgust for the film.

The films is obviously the product of a stressful production in which there were to many influences jostling for dominance. This isn't to say that it isn't eerie, frightening, compelling or thought-provoking, because it's all those things. However, it's never any of those things for long enough. It's often a bit pretentious, boring and never as blood-curdling as Wilson's original book, which was a straightforward, no-frills shocker. What's odd about Mann's film is that while it strains for a sophistication above it's generic roots, it misses out on the un-forced passages of contemplation in the book, where Wilson ruminated on his different character's inner desires. This no-nonsense approach on Wilson's part had a crucial grounding effect. Without it, the film often comes across as a curious fairy-tale (in a bad way), and at other times plain daft. It's hinted at that the soldiers might be there to harness the monster for military use (why else would they be there?), there are nods Vampire mythology (Scott Glenn's magical weapon resembles a vampire hunter's kit and the monster literally feeds on the men) and Romania's relationship with German at the time, but otherwise the film is divorced from any kid of reality or genre. This means that Mann's big idea, to explain the emotional attraction of fascism and then confront the Nazis with the ultimate embodiment of fascism, which proves too much even for them, has no gravity at all: it's just rootless drama with no consistent stylistic grounding. The film's set design and cinematography do help him somewhat, though, overshadowing all the characters like much of Nazi architecture and enforcing the idea that human and supernatural evil share a common ambition to control everything.

Ultimately, the film fails to confront the same challenge all films in the war-horror sub-genre: how can you convince the audience that the other-worldly horror is greater than the evil of man. To his credit, Mann addresses in it in an original way, and tries to say the two are differently similar: the age old evil of 'Molasar' (never named in the film, but listed in the credits and faithful to the book), designed to look like some demonic Teutonic Knight, was born of hatred and a lust for power, much like the Nazis. When Major Kaempffer is finally confronted by the monster, he asks where he's come from, vainly trying to ward him off with a cross. Molasar replies with a weary condescension: "where am I from. I am… From you." This exchange, one of the film's more frightening and atmospheric moments, takes place in The Keeps main entrance, knee deep in the blasted corpses of troops Molasar has just massacred, bringing to mind charred, piled corpses of Holocaust victims.

The Keep is considerably more thoughtful and ambitious than the likes of Outpost, The Bunker and Deathwatch (films it obviously inspired), but in the end it's broken-backed film, because Mann fails to marry of the war and horror genres with the same success he had in matching crime and horror in Manhunter. At times, the film is simply too frustrating, or tedious, to be compelling. The Korean R-Point was a much more creepy war-horror movie, making the grim observation that the horror unleashed on its small island setting is cyclical, like the cycle of war, an idea Mann never touches upon.

However, The keep remains more than just an interesting 'curio' as it's often termed, thanks largely to the scale of the production and some truly draw-dropping visual effects: the Nazi troops passage through the mountain pass in the opening credits, with Tangerine Dream's distinctive score rattling in the background, is a triumph, and the troop's violation of the vast crypt, the 'camera' pulling away for an age, is magnificent. It's up to you if you want to invest the time, energy and money is discovering this little-known, little-loved but memorable film.

The Keep is an absurdly ambitious film in which the visual elements are so epic and marvelous that it makes the plot and character development feel like an amateurish joke in comparison. Though everyone gives competent acting performances, the story is far too simple, skeletal, and formulaic to allow them any real depth. Of course, it is widely known that the greatest reason why the movie likely feels this way is because director Michael Mann intended for it to be a 3 1/2 hour movie, while the producers (Paramount) cut it down to an hour and a half against his wishes - I do feel that this lengthy runtime would have served two great purposes: fleshing out the story and characters, and doing a better job of matching the vastness and majesty of the visual presentation and the colossal themes the film presents.

The movie is definitely worth watching at least once for the unique and spooky environment, the VERY 80's and very fun visual effects, some unique thematic ideas, the Tangerine Dream music score, and to see the first film performance of Gandalf himself, Sir Ian McKellan, but it's far from perfect - it's widely known to be a massive failure of a film, but especially if you dig 80's sci-fi or horror, you need to give this anomaly a watch. The Michael Mann trajectory is so bizarre...to go from Thief, to THIS, to Manhunter, and then to Last of The Mohicans and HEAT in the 90's...wild stuff. Regardless of the fact that Mann now "disowns" this film entirely, I would LOVE to see the 3.5 director's cut of this film on a brilliant Blu Ray transfer - this movie deserves to be seen in full quality, and the way the creator intended! Maybe they could fix some of those bizarre segments where the audio just seems to be missing as well...Wild, wild stuff.

A group of German soldiers led by Captain Klaus Woermann are sent to take guard at a Keep near a Romanian pass. One of the soldiers believes that a cross-embedded in the wall is made of silver and digs it out. Only to release an evil presence, known as Molasar. It knocks off a couple of soldiers every night. Sturmbahnfuhrer Kaempffer and his SS patrol arrive in town to stop the problem. They believe it's simply partisan activity, but they soon find out its far from it. So they get the help of a Jewish man, Dr Theodore Cuza (along with his daughter Eva) who knows a bit about this Keep. Meanwhile, a mysterious man, Glaeken Trismegatus is on his way to stop this evil.

Wow! But huh? Yeah, after spending a long time trying to see this hybrid movie. I finally got the chance and it was a very flawed, but reasonable effort by director / writer Michael Mann. I remember reading the quite interesting and extremely unique premise and being totally compelled by the idea of it. I guess not reading F. Paul Wilson's novel is a bittersweet thing, as I came in with very little expectations, but on the on other hand I was left clueless about certain disjointed sub- plots. Anyhow It's Mann's vision we got. The material is terribly mangled, jadedly rushed and comes across as pure pulp. However it's Mann's surreal direction, Alex Thomson's arresting photography and the moody electronic music score by Tangerine Dream that clicks in this atmospheric combination of fantasy, war and horror.

Sure, there was interference by the studio in the final product (with a a lot of scenes hitting the cutting room floor), but Mann seemed more preoccupied with his visuals than with the plot and characters. They became nothing more than forgettable background features. The storyline was all over the ship with forced details (like the creation of evil entity) and a script riddled with confusing holes. There's an odd assortment of performances. Those who stood out were the humane German captain played by Jurgen Prochnow and Gabriel Byrne as the tyrant SS officer. Alberta Watson as Eva felt awkward and Ian McKellen was fine. However Glenn Scott looked as if he was somewhere else in a very laboured role as Glaeken Trismegatus. An intriguing character that had VERY little to do and was hard to understand.

Visually there are plenty of potently dreamy images that spontaneously pop up. There's sharp craftsmanship in depicting certain sequences that just stick in your mind. Like when Byrne's character encounters Molasar. Worked into this is a very effective score that works the emotions thoroughly and creates a very out-of-this-world vibe. What captures this layout beautifully is Thomson's photography. His always in the right spot to get that impressive shot and original angle that just lingers on screen. The special effects is a big (if over-extended) light show that has style and the monster design can look a bit rubbery, but eventually the monster design by Nick Maley does come off. Mann knows how to stage a visually powerful scene, but if your looking for suspense. There are very few build-ups and little scares at all. The pace is slow, but the eerie setting holds up tightly and has a huge impact in the overall feel.

It isn't perfect, but it's a really unusual and hypnotic good vs. evil opus by Mann.