THE KEEP
1983 - ***
Director Michael Mann's so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they Chariots of Fire through the fog towards no noticeable finish line under a haunting two chord synthesizer in The Keep that any semblance of story sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow is sufficiently war weary as the Wermacht officer assigned to a remote Romanian fortress that was built into the side of the Carpathians thousands of years before recorded time. Colorful villagers bring the food and sweep up and wear crosses for der mudder's sake and never visit after dark, and advise the soldiers not to either. Since the Keep's been there longer than their remembered time, they don't even know why they're so freaked. But Jürgen has his orders!
The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls, and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film is blown as well, like dust in the slow motion wind, sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light, illuminating mysterious spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls.
Soon Jürgen's men begin disappearing at geometric rate. Backwards fog machines absorb German souls for use incarnating a dark giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids; Prochnow doesn't see it but does notice his men are vanishing, and as an SS officer, Gabriel Byrne is busting his balls. So bottles are opened, drunk despair occurs, and bloody graffiti in an ancient text prompts him to send for an old Jewish archaeologist-linguist named Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen) currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp. The linguist brings his hot daughter (Alberta Watson), leading to attempted rape by German guards who are promptly absorbed into our monster via a lengthy shot of backwards fog. Is this the fabled Jewish golem? The original Dracula (this being Romania and all)? Whomever he is, he comes to Cruz to offer vengeance against Hitler in exchange for a small favor that will enable him to escape the Keep. As an advance, the being infuses Cruz with youth and he can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking.
As this weird creature is so muscular he begins to resemble the Terminator, which then awakens the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn). From far away he senses a disturbance in the force and takes a slow mo boat at dawn up the Elbe at sunrise, scored to hypnotic synths as the sky streaks red, letting you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series, which began the year after The Keep. Like so many shots in the film there's really no point to this drawn-out dawn-on-the-Elbe boat shot (besides future placement on Mann's reel). Sorry if that sounds snide of me to say. If I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop from Amazon Instant Video (it's not on DVD) I might have just swooned away as I did watching Mann's Miami Vice feature film on blu-ray.
Anyway, Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep, for centuries, and even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, Glen's got to stop him from leaving. Maybe he can shag McKellan's daughter in the process, for he is no sourpuss Christian god, and everyone knows the Hebrews have never considered sex a crime. No wonder they're so damned sensual...
The last time I tried to see this all the way through was in high school when my buddy Alan and his girlfriend (and mine) came over and we played hooky and hung out all day while mom was at work, having sex, which made the film even harder to understand through my ADD brain. It's almost too slow even now, on lots of SSRI meds, but Michael Mann's career is such that we can now admire it as a fledgling auteur's first attempt at transformation even if its ultimate hook--that all the bad guys are done in by their own unconscious manifesting their darkest fears and desires in the rarefied realms of the foggy backlit stony corridors--has been done to death and back again (it you substitute the keep for a mysterious planet or spacecraft, you have Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Event Horizon, Solaris, and even to a certain extent Forbidden Planet). But unlike some of those films, which get way too solemn, Keep still has the mighty monster, a tall giant gray juicehead square with shoulder muscles that make the average linebacker look like Ichabod Crane and a ruthlessness towards fascism that even fascism itself might think extreme.
Maybe if it was a shade less opaque or Mann used less slow motion it would be a classic, but still, it's worth any price to see Ian McKellan, who is now as old as the character he plays at the start of The Keep, suddenly cast off his current age and be young again. Imagine if that were true and we were guaranteed another 30 years of Magneto and Gandalf! Now that we so belatedly know and love him, we would not waste un minuto del McKellan!
Another benefit this film has going is its accurate portrayal of some complicated interrelation between the German army, the SS, and their Romanian allies. WWII historians watching this with their less-sophisto peers can use the events of the film to pompously explain the friction between the relatively sane German infantry and the conclave of sociopaths in the SS, here led by the evil but at least consistent Gabriel Byrne (with a Crispin Glover haircut) and why the Romanians signed on with the Axis (to help them fight off the Soviets) which makes an interesting corollary to the deal between this golem monster and McKellen's linguist.
I'm a big WWII and horror fan and used to read a ton of comic books and this film reminded me of one of my pet imagination projects, an adaptation of DC Comics' Weird War Tales. The Keep would make a damn good middle entry in a horror-war trilogy. Its story could cut down to 30 minutes with ease. I think that's how long it would be anyway if Mann just sped it back up to normal speed. Either way it's weird enough (and played straight enough) to just about sneak by coherency's dozing sentry. And it's good enough to make me hope some day we'll get a blu-ray HD restoration and be able to fathom what what was holding Mann's attention so glacially.
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I COME IN PEACE (DARK ANGEL)
1990 - ***
It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci fi fire power. There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies in a satisfying side plot that allows us to see them getting shot to pieces, and exploded, always a comfort in these harsh economic times, and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant, or something, ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown into an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar in engineering, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!
It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase saturation. The drive-in era was dying by then, and where else was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the Hong Kong neon blue hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.
All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien being on earth to siphon the brains of people getting off on drugs (he avoids junkies, since their glands are often burned out). It works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example; there's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense; if your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.
But hey, it was the 80s, or rather the end of the 80s, the final in a long line of films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension. It's the same formula used in The Keep, though in that instance it came out the year before Terminator's release. So... maybe it all really began with The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) with Gor vs. Vol. You seen that? Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver, descrambling this mess of alphabet called a post. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar, in dark contact lenses, ranting about world domination whilst under the possession of Gor, that's something even Fullbright can get behind.
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