The Unkempt Keep

Maybe you have certain expectations for a movie about Nazis commandeering a Romanian castle holding an eldritch superbeing prisoner. You can throw those expectations out the window because 1983's The Keep is a fascinating splatter of cinema. This fantasy horror film from Michael Mann, of all people, stars Scott Glen, Gabriel Byrne, Jurgen Prochnow, and Ian McKellen. It's part engrossing, Lovecraftian spectacle, and part absolute mess, due to production problems. But even its messiness is kind of intriguing, giving it the quality of a partially destroyed old document. I'd like to think this movie is haunted.

During World War II, a unit of German soldiers takes over the mysterious keep in a remote Romanian village. Despite warnings from the people of the mountains, who seem right out of Tod Browning's Dracula, Captain Woermann (Jurgen Prochnow) aims to make the keep his HQ.

But even he notices strange things about the place. Like how the construction suggests it's trying to keep something in rather than keep anyone out. And there's a mysterious, massive, central chamber, sealed with peculiar silver crosses. When soldiers start dying in weird, grotesque ways, Woermann petitions for a transfer. Instead, the SS show up, headed by a man named Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne).

He wants to torture everyone in the village for information. But eventually the Nazis are told that there's an expert in the pertinent arcane lore in one of their own concentration camps, Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen). He's promptly brought to the keep along with his beautiful daughter Eva (Alberta Watson), whose purpose in the movie alternates between being eye candy and vulnerable person needing protection. Then the final player shows up with no explanation, a superbeing called Glaeken (Scott Glenn).

Wikipedia covers the film's numerous problems in production pretty well, the biggest problem being the death of the special effects supervisor, Wally Veevers, before his effects could be implemented but after the raw footage for them had been shot. Resulting in most of that footage having to be abandoned or reshot. Despite this, the movie was eventually finished in a more than three hour cut which first Mann cut down to two hours and then Paramount cut down to even less. The result is a movie with a third act that makes very little sense, with main characters disappearing or appearing with little explanation. Mann seems to have tried to smooth it all out by having Tangerine Dream put a repetitive, very loud score over it all. It has a hypnotic quality, I'll say that, and I'll admit I actually fell asleep. But the movie was intriguing enough that I went back and finished it properly the next day.

The cast all give good performances. Mann's trademark, deliberately artificial lighting makes it look like television but even that somehow adds to the mystique of the film.

The Keep is available on The Criterion Channel.

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