The Keep (1983)......is one of those movies where Murphy's Law kicked in to overdrive......everything that could possibly go wrong in a film production....went wrong here.
Yet it still remains a tribute to writer-director Michael Mann's well deserved reputation as one of cinema's best practitioners of pure visual storytelling.......
Yes, it's a mess. It's senseless, crazy, seemingly edited with meat cleaver. But enough of what Mann had in mind here, the spinning of his own Grimm's Fairy Tale, managed to survive.
Even in its truncated, chopped to smithereens version, it's a seductively dreamy nightmare experience......and over the years, the film took its place among misbegotten cult movies that still keep their fans enthralled, whatever its faults.
As the other-worldly electronic stylings of Tangerine Dream drone on and on, a company of World War 2 Germans roll through a tiny Romanian village that sits in front of a forbidding stone fortress that looks carved into the side of a mountain. The unit's captain (Jurgen Prochnow) is tasked with securing the mountain pass for the rampaging Reich. But then a couple of his foolish soldiers inadvertently unleash the fortress's unholy occupant.....and whatever it is, it's having a fine time eviscerating more Germans.
The malevolent entity's body count doesn't sit well with a newly arrived contingent of black-uniformed SS stormtroopers led by their equally commanding Fuhrer (Gabriel Byrne). After executing a few villagers as payback, Byrne looks for historical help in fighting the creature from an ailing Jewish professor (Ian McKellen) who along with daughter, was due for concentration camp extermination.
The demonic entity, a huge, muscled, glowy-eyed Hulk named Molasar, cuts a deal with Mckellen to help the monster run amuck in the outside world. But wait! On his way to do titanic special-effects battle with this gruesome Golem comes a formidably mysterious guy (Scott Glenn) who's also got the glowy-eyed power to shoot out frickin' laser beams out of his peepers.
Michael Mann imbues all of this grim hysterical nonsense with an arresting, stunning command of visual imagery would become the hallmark of all his films. Unfortunately, chaos freely reigned throughout the making of the film and the untimely death of the film's ace veteran special effects designer Wally Veevers didn't help matters either.
Though Paramount's 96 minute version of the film ended up far, far from the fantastical 3 hour epic Mann had originally conceived, "The Keep" does hold on to its moody, ominous atmosphere and its ragged reputation as one of strangest, darkest fables tales you'll ever see on screen.
For all film buffs and horror hounds, it's worth a one time watch at least.....2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).
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