Overall Rating
  Awesome: 26.97%
Worth A Look: 42.7%
Average: 3.37%
Pretty Bad: 16.85%
Total Crap: 10.11%
3 reviews, 71 user ratings
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| Keep, The |
by Mel Valentin
"Look here for the definition of a "guilty pleasure."
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Michael Mann’s career has spanned television and film over four decades and close to forty years ("Miami Vice," "Ali," "The Insider," "Heat," "Last of the Mohicans," "Manhunter," "Thief"). Mann’s first narrative film, "The Jericho Mile," it was a made-for-television feature-length film about an Olympic-level athlete serving a life term in San Quentin, aired on ABC in 1979. Filmed on location (at considerable risk), "The Jericho Mile" was superlative, gripping drama. Mann moved from television to feature filmmaking with "Thief," an indie-level film about a thief trying to leave the criminal life behind. Moving from urban drama to historical fantasy/horror, Mann adapted F. Paul Wilson’s bestselling horror novel, "The Keep." It failed commercially and critically (Mann rebounded, though, with "Miami Vice" on NBC a year later).Dinu Pass, Carpathian Mountains, Romania, 1941. Captain Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow), an officer in the German Army, arrives with his men at the keep, a citadel built on the side of a mountain, The ancient keep is unlike anything Woermann or his men have ever seen. One-hundred-and-eighty nickel crosses are embedded in the keep’s walls. Alexandru (William Morgan Sheppard), the village mason warns Woermann away from the keep, claiming it’s haunted. Woermann refuses to heed the admonition. Woermann recognizes, however, that the citadel was constructed to keep something from escaping rather than to keep invaders out. On the first night, two of Woermann’s men are brutally murdered. Every night, more soldiers are killed. Woermann asks to be reassigned to a different post, but his superiors refuse.
Rather than abandon the keep, Woermann's superiors send in a squad of SS soldiers headed by Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne). Kaempffer immediately assumes anti-German partisans are responsible for the deaths of Woermann’s men. Graffiti written in a dead language on the keep's wall lead Woermann and Kaempffer to seek help in deciphering the graffiti, but their options are limited to a Jewish medievalist, Dr. Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen), and his daughter, Eva (Alberta Watson). In Greece, Glaeken (Scott Glenn), the keep's benefactor, awakens and speeds toward Romania, hoping to stop the evil imprisoned in the keep from escaping into the world.
The mix of supernatural horror with the real-like horrors of the Nazis and World War II may strike some viewers as callous, callow, and insensitive. That may be true, but if Steven Spielberg's adventure/fantasy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, proved that caricaturing Nazis could be highly profitable. The Keep, though, was a self-consciously serious film, arthouse horror if you prefer. There was none of the tongue-in-cheek humor found in Raiders of the Lost Ark to make The Keep more palatable to general audiences or to remind them that they were seeing fantasy not reality. Not surprisingly, The Keep failed at the box office, leading Mann to television work (e.g., Miami Vice) for several years before trying his hand again directing feature films with 1986's Manhunter (Hannibal Lecter's first appearance onscreen).
Mann relied on German expressionistic set design (circa 1920s) as a baseline for the keep’s interiors. That’s bound to turn off some viewers who expect a measure of verisimilitude with their historical dramas (or historical horrors, as The Keep is). Realism aside, the walls of the citadel look artificial (certainly not like the stone and rocks they’re meant to imitate). On the plus side, Mann’s decision to build the exteriors and the small, Romanian town in an abandoned quarry in Wales, England makes for a memorable set. Mann was forced to use construction cranes to move equipment and people to and from the set every day (a small price to pay for the eventual results onscreen).
For The Keep, Mann made stylistic choices that, in hindsight, verge on or slip into camp. Mann never met a smoke or fog machine he didn't like or feel compelled to use in just about every scene, needed or unneeded. Obscuring the interior sets makes sense, both aesthetically (for mood and atmosphere) and financially (the more smoke used, the less detailed the sets have to be). Mann also seems a fan of dramatic lighting, juxtaposing the angled walls of the citadel with angled lighting (presumably from the outside world) and, of course, slowly drifting smoke. Mann also uses smoke effects to keep the monster hidden from view, at least until the end, when the demon's emergence reveals an actor in a hypertrophied, rubber suit (it's as disappointing as it sounds).
Instead of using a period-specific, orchestral score, Mann decided to use an anachronistic score commissioned from electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream. Tangerine Dream's slow-paced score is suitably moody, creating a semi-psychedelic, oneiric haze that often matches the smoke-and-lighting effects used for the keep. Tangerine Dream's score becomes borderline cheesy, however, when it’s used to underline a seemingly endless procession of slow-motion shots (soldiers running toward the camera, soldiers running away from the camera, characters in an intimate embrace, etc.). There’s another negative: Tangerine Dream’s score does little (actually, it does nothing) to suggest or maintain The Keep’s more overt horror elements.Ultimately, "The Keep" is best seen as a minor film by a major filmmaker, a minor misstep (if we’re being kind) or a major misfire (if we’re not), an attempt by a talented filmmaker to try out unfamiliar genre material. That it almost works is a testament to Mann’s abilities, but, as Mann himself has admitted in interviews, "The Keep" is a perfect example of what not to do, i.e., going into pre-production without a finished screenplay (alas, it’s a lesson Mann seems to have forgotten when he adapted "Miami Vice" as a feature film last year). It's difficult to imagine the long-rumored three-hour cut being appreciably better than the released version. Still, even with its many faults, "The Keep" should have been available on DVD or Blu-Ray long ago (when so much inferior product is).
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4080&reviewer=402
originally posted: 01/12/07 06:51:34
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USA
16-Dec-1983 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
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