The Keep (1983)

THE KEEP (1983) - ***

With DVD technology now over a decade old, one would think the studios would have completely released all of their catalogue cinema library onto DVD. As MGM, Anchor Bay, and Blue Underground have proven, there is seemingly an audience for every title.

Now take a Paramount picture that isn't on DVD, and has been out of print since the early 1980s. Now imagine this movie having a hell of a cast with Sir Ian McKellen, the awesomely underused Scott Glenn, Jurgen Prochnow, and Gabriel Bryne. Plus, it was an early effort from one of my favorite filmmakers, writer/director Michael Mann.

Oh, and the plot is Nazis getting eaten by a monster.

If bad 50's French pornography can get a decent DVD release, why not THE KEEP?

I doubt if any of you good folks have seen this film, but if you ever might, you'll might know immediately know why with the smoke, the Tangerine Dream score raging in the background, and tanks rumbling through the Dinu mountain pass.

This might be one of the more goddamn bizarre studio-released pictures you'll ever see.

Based off on a then-popular novel penned by F. Paul Wilson, its 1941 and the Nazi German war machine rolls over Romania. Prochnow leads his German Army attachment into a remote mountain village that is home to "The Keep."

Generations of a peasant family have overseen it as caretakers, despite not knowing why a lone silver cross is surrounded by copper-laden crosses, nor for the structure's intended purpose.

Prochnow doesn't understand why a fortress built more to keep something in than out exists, but he uses it anyway as a base for his troops. Some treasure-hunting Nazis break open the silver cross, and all hell breaks loose.

The blackshirt SS arrive to "rectify the situation," which they do by executing random villagers. If Prochnow is reprising his "Good German" character from DAS BOOT, then Bryne in his brief scenes is a terrific Nazi asshole.

You know, the sorts that proudly shoot women and children, claim that he was only following orders at trial, or flee off to Argentina and try to pass off as innocent bystanders. If Ralph Fiennes had many scenes to make himself absolutely vile in SCHINDLER'S LIST, then Bryne makes alot out of nothing. No wonder he helps make the ending for THE USUAL SUSPECTS work.

The Nazis snatch a crippled dying languistics expert in McKellen and his daughter from the Death Camps to solve it, all the while a mysterious blue-eyed stranger in Scott Glenn travels from Greece to this "Keep" with great urgency.

And that is the plot that makes sense. The rest of the film I've only comprehended in the vaguest of terms since this movie is so ambigious, or the sorts that occur from a filmmaker trying to be visually atmospheric and moody, combined with reportedly massive re-cutting by the studio.

So much of the story, its people, and events occur out of the blue (like Glenn falling in love with the daughter) that it just adds to the oddball and sorta charming mystique that radiates from THE KEEP for me.

I've always thought of THE KEEP of sorts like that great TWILIGHT ZONE episode, "The Howling Man," where a visitor inadvertedly frees the Devil from his prison. The difference with the way I see KEEP though, you have in the Nazis possibly the most evil scum that's ever walked the Earth, who end up getting slaughtered by something even more evil.

It's a great primordial evil that predates way before Lucifer's fall from the Heavens, the sort that's lived on in one form or another in legends around the world. It's evil itself.

McKellen makes a deal with this creature to regain his health, to save his ethnicity threatened with exinction by Hitler's human army of darkness. It's a Faustian accord made not out of greed, but out of the very thing that the road to Hell is paved with.

Then with Glenn, he is a spirit for an ancient "good" that wants to stay with this woman, but he can't for if Evil is to be stopped, Good has to sacrifice greatly to bring back the balance.

Trust me, THE KEEP is a mess, but its the rare sort that I enjoyed it more for the idea than the actual execution. Years back, since I wanted to know exactly what the hell was going on, I read Wilson's book.

It's a good read, but in explaining actually the hero and villain, it renders my interpretation of the movie mute, and its very much less interesting. Add to that a happy romantic ending that apparently was also in Mann's final cut before the studio altered it.

While its really clumsy in how they acheived the finale, along with a dreaded "paused" snapshot, how many movies chopped by the studio actually stay away from the safe ending and pick the appropriate ending?

Then again, maybe Mann's original edit makes that happy conclusion work, and is a better film. Who knows, but as the Director's Cut is locked inside Paramount's own Keep, we may never know what lurks within it. Almost as mysterious as to why its not on DVD.

Yeah I did...and its decent, but maybe my problem with it is that my interpretation of the film's (muddled-up) narrative was that it was pure Evil, as if its a substance or something of which has difference faces to different cultures around the world. Which adds to the appeal of the Nazis getting slashed to bits by something even more evil than them.

Mind you, the book is good, but Vampires aren't as interesting as "Pure Evil."

No, and really have no interest in them. But who knows?

Ever seen the movie?