Post by ronnierocketago on Jan 7, 2008 6:29:10 GMT
"Where am I from? I am...from you."[/i][/size]
THE KEEP (1983) - ***
With DVD technology now about to enter it's third decade, one would think the studios would have completely released all of their catalogue cinema library onto DVD. As MGM, Anchor Bay, Troma, and Blue Underground have proven, there is seemingly an audience for every title. I mean Jesus, Anchor Bay even put out goddamn REPOSSESSED for fuck's sake.
Now take today's review, which I'm doing on the unintentional request of ADer Aaron Leggo. This is a Paramount picture that still isn't on DVD, and has been effectively 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, the German juggernaut Jurgen Prochnow, and the usual suspect Gabriel Bryne. Plus, it was an early effort from one of my favorite filmmakers, writer/director Michael Mann. Yes the same auteur behind awesome stuff like HEAT, THE INSIDER, MIAMI VICE, COLLATERAL, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and so forth.
Consider that I only got to watch this movie because I bought from a buddy back two years ago. It was a worn-out, fading videotape that he had recorded it on Showtime sometime back in the Clinton Decade, and it's age is apparent when it would "warp" here and there. For you kids grown up on DVD, that refernence means nothing, but we VHS survivors know it all too well. Also note that I paid $20, which is peanuts to the insane prices I've seen VHS and Laserdisc copies go for at eBay.
Oh, and the plot is Nazis getting eaten by a monster.
This is the question I ask of you all, and the DVD industry. If you google, you'll discover that bad 50's French pornography can get a decent DVD release...but not THE KEEP. Why the fuck not THE KEEP? Did it murder somebody or "touch" a kid? Shit Michael Jackson got off easy compared to KEEP. It's not like it swept the Razzies or got kids killed on camera like that TWILIGHT ZONE movie. Why!?!
From the response at AwardsDaily, I'm not surprised that most of you...ok, none of you...haven't seen THE KEEP. A pity because regardless of what one thinks of KEEP if and when they ultimately track it down, you'll know immediately that with the fog, the German-native Tangerine Dream soundtrack raging in the background, and Nazi tanks rumbling down the Dinu mountain pass....this might just be one of the more goddamn bizarre major studio-released pictures you'll ever see. Hell even critic Leonard Maltin said it as much. Me, I would call that a badge of honor.
Based off on a then-popular novel penned by F. Paul Wilson, its 1941 and the Nazi German war machine rolls all over Romania. Not to be a dick, but at least Romania was spared the jokes, unlike Poland or France. Prochnow leads his German Army attachment into a remote mountain village that is home to this mysterious " Keep." Generations of a peasant family have overseen it as caretakers, yet know nothing about it, why a lone silver cross is surrounded by copper crosses, nor the structure's intended purpose.
Now if that doesn't set off your weird shit-oh-meter, Prochnow realizes that it wasn't built to keep intruders out, but rather something in. But since the Nazis have had encounters with the lost Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, apparently this eerie environment wasn't enough to spook Prochnow away from using the joint as a base for his troops. Well some treasure-hunting Nazis (ancestors of Diane Krueger) snatch the silver cross, which was the door enclosing...something...and all goddamn hell breaks loose. Goose-marching soldiers get massacred in droves this side of a slasher picture, a rare one where people probably cheer the killer on.
Anyway, the blackshirt SS arrive to "rectify the domestic situation," which means of course executing villagers. If Prochnow is reprising his sympathetic rational "Good German" character from DAS BOOT, then Bryne in his brief scenes is a terrific Nazi asshole that you would have want melted by Jehovah. You know what I mean, the sorts that proudly shoot women and children for the Fatherland, claim that he was only following orders at trial, or flee off to Argentina and try to pass off as an innocent bureuacrat. If Ralph Fiennes had many scenes to make himself absolutely vile in SCHINDLER'S LIST, then Bryne makes alot of work with much less. Hell even Germans today hate the Nazis, and it''s a sure bet that Quentin Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERDS will be a box-office hit in Deutchland.
Off-topic, but is it possible that Bryne somehow is still incredibly underrated somehow as an actor? I mean let's admit it folks, he helped make the USUAL SUSPECTS ending work, just without winning an Oscar. Let's try to give him some more awesome work and some credit, ok? that IN TREATMENT shit doesn't cut it for me though. Come on Hollywood, Bryne can be more than just the villain.
Since this new exposed Keep has ancient indecipherable writings on its walls, the Nazis get the dying crippled languistics expert McKellen and his daughter to solve all this. Or more like snatched them from the death camps. Meanwhile, an enigmatic stranger (Glenn) with storming blue eyes wakes up, and travels from Greece all the way to the 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. 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. The Tangerine Dream composition helps too. This is what happens when a filmmaker is trying to pull a visually atmospheric and moody mythical film, combined with reportedly massive re-cutting by the studio after the mountain fired Mann.
Sorry that this comes off as hyperbole, and trust me it doesn't stack up to it, but I'm reminded of Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS, another film sliced about like a pig, and coming off as a bizarre but memorable dream.
But the for the more understable logic of why I like THE KEEP, is the basic thematics play like that terrific old TWILIGHT ZONE episode "The Howling Man," where a naive visitor inadvertedly frees the Devil from his Earthly imprisonment. In THE KEEP, you have the Nazis, easily among the most evil scum that's ever walked the Earth, who end up getting slaughtered by something actually even more evil. It's a great primordial supernatural 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. Shit maybe to the ancients, this dude inspired Satan? Either way, it's the evil. It's evil itself.
What's brilliant though is how all this deals with McKellen. Imagine you're him, and the Nazis have exterminated millions of your own ethnicity, and in 1941 Europa seemingly on the verge of becoming Germania. This creature also saves his girl from getting raped by Nazis, so McKellen makes a deal to help him regain his health and the monster become the equalizer to Hitler's army of darkness. It's a Faustian accord not made out of greed, but desperation, the very sort of stone that the road to Hell is paved with. And nobody can blame the guy. Do you? I don't.
This is a major spoiler alert, but I like this sequence where Prochnow and Bryne are in a final standoff, when the restored evil arrives on the scene to churn out some more sauerkraut, and Prochnow decides by gut instinct to go for the cross over the gun. Bryne uses that opportunity to eliminate him, and unless I'm mistaken, Prochnow is the only trooper to not become lunch. Yeah he was an alright chap. But after he becomes the last man standing, he ends up taking the cross and uses it to try to save his weasel ass from this divine being by forgiveness. Because it's a vengeful-but-forgiving God, right? Wrong. The cenobites from HELLRAISER and their ancient tradition of morality come to mind here, with those last eight spooky words:
Also with Glenn, apparently this eternal guardian of light against this thing, you have this (underdeveloped) dilemma where he loves this human woman, but alas he can't for if Evil is to be stopped once again, Good has to sacrifice to bring back the balance. You know, all that inconvenient ying-yang shit that gets in the way of a sexy Jewish princess. You poor Glenn, who was also the star in another unreleased Region 1 title-shot-by-master-director in John Frankenheimer's martial arts actioneer THE CHALLENGE with Toshiro Mifune. Yes, Glenn and Mifune together in a Frankenheimer movie. Where is it?!?![/i]
Thing is, I don't know anymore if this THE KEEP I'm describing is the actual movie, or just my original interpretation that's stuck around in subsequent rescreenings. If KEEP was on DVD, AwardsDaily posters would probably watch it, and tell me to quit overrating dogshit and wasting their time from bitching at "distracting cameos" (what the hell does that mean?) in Mann's PUBLIC ENEMIES and pretending Nicole Kidman is still a relevant movie star that didn't help murder New Line Cinema, the House that Freddy Built. You bitch.
Trust me, THE KEEP is a choppy mess, but the rare sort of mess that I enjoy perhaps more for the idea than for the actual execution. Something special still breaks through this labyrinth narrative. In fact after my first KEEP viewing, I went out and bought Wilson's book since I wanted to know what exactly the hell was going on. A good read, but turns out this epic "evil" is nothing more than another goddamn vampire. Lame. This explination of the hero and villain actually renders my interpretation less interesting....anyone ever heard such a weird scenario before?
Plus the book has this romantic happy ending, which to be fair Mann apparently kept in his final cut before the studio chopped it. I'm not against the idea, but this better not come off as cheesy in Mann's version. The final film we have (or me and bootleggers) is really clumsy in how the studio acheives it, using the old dreaded "pause" snapshot. I wonder, how many studio-altered movies actually stay away from the safe ending in favor of the supposed more "appropriate" ending?
Oh and Aaron Leggo, in response to your Tangerine Dream question...apparently that group was pissed at THE KEEP and Mann because out of their 16 tracks, only 3 ended up in the final cut, in complete contrast to their score for Mann's THIEF. Apparently Dream briefly limited released their soundtrack in 1997, only to be halted due to some unexplained rights issues. So much like the Director's Cut is locked up inside Paramount's own Keep, so goes for this album, and much like it's current DVD situation, I don't get it.
Then again, what else would I expect from THE KEEP?