The Keep (1983)

The movie I'm going to talk about today is an odd duck: and not one which can be explained away in my usual irreverent shtick.

As a matter of fact, this is something deserving of its own classification; one in which visual style and flair and high-falutin' direction takes center stage - while story and character are off stage-left, catching a smoke break in the mezzanine, that kinda thing.

Our movie is a product from Michael Mann, whom 100% of you will recognize as the creator of "Miami Vice", a ground-breaking TV show in its own right. And he also did some pretty important movies along the way, like Heat (1995) and The Last of the Mohicans (1993), but as Werner Herzog reminds us, even dwarves started small, as did Michael Mann when he hit the big leagues with 1981's Thief.

Thief was a tight, well-made crime-noir drama about a career criminal (James Caan) who wants to chuck it all and go legit, and it's also one of Caan's best performances. He, Tuesday Weld, Jim Belushi, Robert Prosky and the always-unsung-as-an-actor Willie Nelson shine in a story directed with style to spare by Mann. It was a sleeper hit, as they say, and everyone looked to Mann for a follow-up that would blow everything that came before out of the water and the audience through the back wall of the theater.

And then it struck: The Sophomore Curse. You've heard of this before - it befalls any young tyro who comes out of the gate fast and furious with their premiere effort then, when pressed for a follow-up, they stumble and falter and the result is something that falls short of all pre-conceived expectations.

It happens to a lot of hot-shot directors, and it sure happened to Michael Mann.

1983 was the year Paramount Pictures released Mann's second motion picture, titled The Keep - and in a nice touch of irony, they probably wish they had given the whole thing to someone else.

Anyway take my plot, please: in 1942 Romania, a German Army detachment headed by Captain Woermannis (Jürgen Prochnow) is sent to occupy a mysterious Romanian citadel located on a strategic mountain pass. One of the soldiers mistakenly releases an unknown force trapped within the walls and, as a result, other soldiers are killed in mysterious ways. Soon, the SS arrives to deal with what is thought to be partisan activity. What they and their leader Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) find, however, is an evil force trapped within the Keep and a force which will do anything in order to escape. They must then depend on the work of a a Jewish man (Ian McKellen) and his daughter (Alberta Watson), who are both knowledgeable of the keep in question are brought in to find out what is happening...along with a mysterious man (Scott Glenn) who is drawn to the area after sensing strange goings-on.

You're probably thinking this isn't a logical follow-up to a crime drama and you're right: Romanian villages don't provide the same feel as a gritty Los Angeles backdrop of neon and darkness. Seems that Mann wanted to branch out and delve into new, uncharted waters with some sort of supernatural Euro-block mind trip, an interesting turn of venue, you gotta admit.

But from the opening shot of an eyeball staring off in the distance to the back-lit characters running around to a glowing Scott Glenn to an embodiment of Evil that looks like a bloated Silver Surfer, The Keep makes it clear that no matter your predilection to sci-fi, fantasy, European movies, World War II, Nazis and/or Tangerine Dream's music, this is going to be one weird mamajama.

Mann even went to all the trouble of adapting the screenplay from the original source novel from F. Paul Wilson (yes, Virginia: this was all from a book), and while I haven't read the book itself I imagine that a little bit of poetic license was taken here and there to get it all where it ended up. After all, when a director as creative as Mann gets an idea for a visual in his head, it could be a slice-of-life farm drama and he'd find a way to work a swirling light show of colors in it somewhere. I just know the guy.

The cast does what they can. It's a shame to say that in a cast that contains Prochnow, (who has Das Boot to his credit, but followed this up with Dune, so there you go), Glenn (who also was one of many in The Right Stuff this same year), McKellen (whose track record is a proud one, to say the least), Byrne (who's been in some good stuff that even I'VE watched!) and Prosky (who's also great but was probably in here as a call-back from the Thief cast because Mann owed him a favor). However, the purpose of actors in a movie like The Keep is is not to act, but to RE-act: to their surroundings, to the effects, to the incomprehensible turns of events, and so on.

You wanna know a secret? This is a weird film. REAL weird. And I've seen every weird film there is. But The Keep is the peanuttiest of them all. And to be perfectly honest, I can't tell you whether this is a good movie or a bad movie. I'm in the same quandary I was in for my review of Death Ship (but for different reasons) - we have a good director who knows how to make shots intriguing and focus o how everyone and everything looks. But we also have a supernatural mishmash that drums up drama and intrigue, pads it out, introduces new ideas and characters, fleshes out nothing and ends up trying to make a profound statement only without knowing what it wants to make a profound statement about. They do make for pretty images, though. Suffice it to say that if the image is the message, then the message is garbled.

The Keep is one of those movies that is all lead-in - you wait for the actual movie to start all the way through then, when it gets here, you don't know what to make of it.

See my point? That's the problem with The Keep, and the problem with Mann's approach: he has all of these great visuals he wants to jam into his movie and dazzle you with, so he has to also have a story that makes for great visuals...oops, forgot to write in parts for the actors. Oh well....

Mann would grow out of this phase eventually. So would the actors. As a matter of fact, The Keep hasn't even made it onto DVD as of this writing. What we have here is a great example of The Sophomore Curse, so much so that maybe the studio or the director one bought up all the rights just to guarantee that it never makes it past VHS and Betamax.

Would you believe that this movie cost $6 million to make? Would you further believe that it made back about 2/3 of that amount? Yeah, I'd believe the second sentence more my own self.

Purists of such grand imagery may disagree (and I certainly plan to hear about it), but The Keep is nothing worth keeping. In fact, as far as that classification I mentioned at the beginning of this review, here it is - The Keep is Europsychofantahorror.

And I think it's just as well that we keep it as one-of-a-kind.