"The Keep" is the kind of film where unless you've read the book it was based on, you can forget about finding a narrative plot. It's based on a novel by noted horror writer F. Paul Wilson, the first in his six book Adversary cycle and the story probably makes more sense in book form. The book was a best seller so it makes perfect sense to turn out a motion picture. Michael Mann, fresh from 1981's "Thief", adapts the screenplay, assembles a cast that includes some very interesting actors, gets several million dollars from Paramount, and heads off to England. The end result holds together quite well for about twenty minutes, bringing the German Army (under the command of Captain Klaus Woermann, played by Jurgen Prochnow) to an isolated area in the Carpathian Alps of Romania, which consists of a village and a terrifying fortress called, simply, the Keep. Some foolish soldiers who really should pay more attention to the creepy-old-guy-who-looks-after-the-place start messing around looking for treasure and unwittingly release an evil force from its millennium-long imprisonment. This happens in a jaw-dropping sequence that appears to be a six-hundred foot tracking shot through mid-air. Then some special effects happen, and before you know it, the movie falls completely apart.
The movie ran over budget, Paramount stepped in, took final edit away from Mann and made the film incomprehensible. The SS (led by Major Erich Kaempffer, (Gabriel Byrne, in his motion picture debut) comes in due to the deaths of German soldiers blamed on rebels but actually the work of the creature. Then they bring in Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen giving what maybe his worst performance ever) and his daughter Eva (Alberta Watson, the mother from "Spanking the Monkey".) Then a mystical warrior shows up, and it's Scott Glenn. He's inscrutable, he doesn't have a reflection, and he looks like he's been directed to act like he's on serious medication. He and Eva embark on a tantric sex thing before they've even really spoken to one another, and the good doctor is healed by the evil force, but he doesn't think it's an evil force. Plus, there's a priest in the village and he was a friend of the Cuzas, but then he isn't. Periodically, a very serious, intense argument will break out between characters that seem to be straining for some form of political or sociological weight, to no avail. Prochnow has several shouting matches with Byrne about why he hates totalitarianism, which I'll leave for the political scholars to puzzle their way through.
The two main adversaries of the piece are not mentioned by name until the last four minutes of the film, and even then only in passing and only once. There is no discipline, narrative or otherwise, which could possibly hold together the last seventy minutes of this film. Author Wilson was so disgusted with the end result that he wrote a short story, entitled "Cuts", about a horror writer who uses voodoo to kill a director who'd misadapted one of his stories.
And yet this film is never anything less than captivating. Part of this is due to the unique score by Tangerine Dream. It swirls, thuds, and suffuses the frame with an eerie, electric beauty that is quite suitably epic in tone. In addition to that, Cinematographer Alex Thomson is a genius with light, filling the anamorphic frame with an eerie and beautiful incandescence. There are several shots in this film that are quite breathtaking in terms of composition, lighting, and fear-laced beauty. The effects are a mixed bag, though since it's 1983, thankfully there is no CGI. The use of traveling mattes and reverse-fog is excellent, as are the five or six different ways that Nazis are shattered like china dolls. The excess of lasers at the end seems a little too disco and not as climactic as it doubtless was intended.
If Mann holds to his pattern of going back and recutting all of his films (which he has done for all of his features except "The Insider" and this one), perhaps one day we will see a version of "The Keep" that actually makes sense. But until then, a small but vocal internet cult will ensure that some people will find their way to "The Keep" every now and then. The film has not received a official DVD release but is currently available on Netflix streaming.
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