This week on New Adventures in Netflix we shine a spotlight on one of the more unexpected treasures now available on instant streaming: Michael Mann’s The Keep. Long unavailable on home video – rumor has it that Michael Mann isn’t exactly proud of this one – this gothic horror fantasy unceremoniously popped up on Netflix a short while ago. As Mann Fans (he’s the director of Heat, The Insider and The Last of the Mohicans amongst many others), we were naturally excited to take a look at this early film from one of America’s greatest directors, starring a younger Ian McKellan decades before everybody knew who he was. And do you know what we discovered?
The Keep is one weird mamma jamma.
Michael Mann’s first film after his lauded crime thriller Thief was adapted from F. Paul Wilson’s novel about Nazis assigned to guard a mysterious keep in the Romanian mountains during World War II. They quickly learn that the structure was not designed to keep enemies out, but to keep a malevolent demonic force inside. Unable to leave without deserting their posts, they hold their ground as more and more soldiers die every night. Oh… those poor Nazis…
The Keep is a ridiculously slow-paced movie but action picks up a bit – which is to say there is eventually some action – after the Nazis spring a medieval historian named Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellan) from a concentration camp to help solve the keep’s mysteries. Before long Dr. Cuza makes a deal with the demonic force to free it from captivity in exchange for the fall of the Third Reich. (For an academic, he’s surprisingly keen to deal with a supernatural murderer who looks like a walking skeleton monster with glowing red eyes.) Meanwhile, a sleepy-eyed Scott Glenn (The Silence of the Lambs) wakes up in a motel room suddenly and starts making his way towards the Romanian mountains to save the day. He’s basically Scatman Crothers in The Shining except that he gets to shag the female lead, Doctor Cuza’s daughter (played by Alberta Watson), in one of the most bizarrely choreographed lovemaking sessions in film history. Seriously, it’s a cross between yoga and improv exercises, and it doesn’t so much look erotic as it looks very, very boring.
In the history of movie credits sequences, there are no four words more evocative than “Music by Tangerine Dream.” You know exactly what you’re in for once you see those: The music will be ethereal and hopelessly synthetic. The film will take itself very seriously despite obvious B-Movie trappings. And most importantly there will be a hell of a lot of mist. (I’m not sure whether filmmakers in the 1980’s said “We’re getting Tangerine Dream so break out the fog machine” or “We’re getting a fog machine so break out Tangerine Dream,” but the situation clearly chickeny and egglike.) The Keep is no exception to this rule. Tangerine Dream’s depressing and often bizarre musical choices confuse triumph with terror and crippling depression with fairy tale wonder. Either way, this 1940’s period film is nothing if not a product of the 1980’s. On a side note, I really miss shoulder pads and big hair. Is that just me?
Despite its shoddy pacing and cryptic mythology, The Keep isn’t entirely a bad movie. There are moments of memorable awesomeness, like a mind-boggling shot of the keep’s inner sanctum or a very fine performance by Jurgen Prochnow as the most sympathetic movie Nazi before Oskar Schindler. But Mann’s direction – which may not be entirely to blame, since the film was supposedly cut down from 3 1/2 hours to this greatly truncated 96-minute version – leaves this movie about Gods and Nazis and Monsters feeling less like a piece of badass historical fiction and more like a wonky tone poem. Seriously, this is a movie in which Nazis are murdered by Satan and saved by an angelic alien with a laser staff. “Classing it up a bit” doesn’t just feel disingenuous, it’s practically wrong.
Fans of Michael Mann, Ian McKellan or 1980’s genre movies need to see The Keep. As a long-unavailable piece of modern movie history it’s one of the most joyous discoveries on Netflix Instant Streaming. It’s not very good, but at least it’s utterly fascinating.
