Michael Mann’s WW2 horror disaster is still a fascinating item, especially in 4K. We marvel at its moody ‘architectural’ atmosphere, that generates dread even when the movie just plain ain’t workin’. The interesting actors include Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, Scott Glenn and a very different-looking Ian McKellen. Elijah Drenner’s full stack of extras dig deep into the hows and whys of this ‘Nazis versus Golem’ opus; we’re still short on guesses as to exactly what writer-director Mann was after.

The Keep
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Vinegar Syndrome
1983 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date November 29, 2024 / Available from Vinegar Syndrome / 49.98
Starring: Scott Glenn, Alberta Watson, Jürgen Prochnow, Robert Prosky, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen, Morgan Sheppard, Royston Tickner, Michael Carter, Wolf Kahler, Rosalie Crutchley.
Cinematography: Alex Thomson
Production Designer: John Box
Art Directors: Alan Tomkins, Herbert Westbrook
Costume Design: Anthony Mendelson
Film Editor: Dov Hoenig
Visual Effects: Wally Veevers, Robin Browne, Peter Kuran
Music: Tangerine Dream
Screenplay by Michael Mann from the novel by F. Paul Wilson
Produced by Gene Kirkwood, Howard W. Koch Jr.
Directed by Michael Mann

Michael Mann has directed his share of powerful, entertaining pictures —  Thief,  The Last of the Mohicans,  Heat — but his second outing was a major stumble, a fantasy jumble placing  The Golem during the Nazi occupation. The Holocaust is just a sidebar in the scattershot reach for Big Ideas, ‘context’ for a knock-down drag-’em-out battle between good and evil demi-gods that might as well be characters from the Marvel Universe.

Maybe Michael Mann just wasn’t ready for The Keep. It seems odd that a filmmaker so organized and focused could have become mired in such sticky narrative quicksand. Defenders say the project fell apart in post-production, when the visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers suddenly died. Others wonder if a very long purported first cut of the movie, that nobody has been able to see, might have been a masterpiece. Whittled down to a modest length, the finished show plays as if major episodes were missing. But restoring them wouldn’t improve some scenes that are just plain klunkers.

Don’t be discouraged, fans of The Keep … we talk about reasons to like the show down below a bit.

In 1941 Germany’s onslaught has penetrated deep into Russia. Wehrmacht commander Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow of  Dune) is given the job of securing a narrow pass in Romania. He finds an enormous medieval structure, a curiously-designed place with weird metallic crosses in the walls. Its interior is suitable to shelter his troops, so Woermann ignores the locals’ warnings to Keep Out. Looking for treasure, some of his guards are killed by an unknown force that Woermann can’t locate. He asks for help, and his superiors send an SS company commanded by Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne). The Nazi ideologue assumes partisans are responsible; he has three locals executed, just for effect. Kaempffer dismisses Woermann’s explanations of an unknown force. Eastern Orthodox priest Father Fonescu (Robert Prosky) reports that the imprisoned Jewish scholar, Dr. Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen), knows some of the secrets of The Keep. The wheelchair-bound Cuza is pulled from a ‘final solution’ train, along with his daughter Eva (Alberta Watson). Kaempffer still thinks it’s all a partisan trick; he gives Cuza three days to interpret some weird writing that has appeared on an interior Keep wall.

Possible spoilers …  The Germans have disturbed a supernatural being, Radu Molasar (Michael Carter). It first manifests as a force of light and smoke, and then begins to take on human form, with glowing red eyes and mouth. Dr. Cuza knows little about The Keep, and only wants to save his daughter — but then he encounters Molasar personally. The Golem-like monster claims that it wants to rid the world of the Nazi oppressors, and proves his magic power by partly rejuvenating Cuza, and making his infirmities vanish. Dr. Cuza’s part of the bargain is simple. There is a sacred Talisman in The Keep that Molasar can’t touch; he entreats Cuza to dig it up and hide it in the forest.

But a second supernatural being enters the drama. When the evil force in The Keep becomes active, the same kind of light-magic awakens in a drifter named Glaeken (Scott Glenn), who travels from Greece to oppose Molasar. Upon arrival in the Romanian pass, Glaeken’s first act is to make love to Eva. He then tells Dr. Cuza that Molasar is nobody’s savior, but an all-destroying threat that needs to be imprisoned in The Keep forever.

That’s a pretty thick wad of cod theology; The Keep begins on a good note but almost immediately descends into faux-profound banality. Nobody wears spandex tights or a cape, but suddenly we’re in a German Expressionist spin on a superhero / supervillain comic. The only real mystery is how Michael Mann got caught in a story that a 12-year-old might invent: ‘Nazis are bad, but ooooh, this guy is far worse!’

With so much weird exposition to cover, the characters have only a few lines of dialogue each to explain themselves and advance the concept’s Big Ideas. Prochnow’s Woermann and Byrne’s Kaempffer begin as nicely-sketched kamerad-enemies, but end up in a painfully trite debate, ‘good German’ vs. ‘bad German.’ Some of the exposition is nicely done, but the rush to keep the movie in motion short-changes the characterizations.

That said, most of the film’s casting is very good. Robert Prosky, a nasty hoodlum in Mann’s Thief, is here a well-written Priest, an intelligent good guy. Father Fonescu’s suggestion that the Germans bring in an expert is a crafty attempt to save the Cuzas from a death camp. Not enough is done with the fact that Dr. Cuza is faking his knowledge of the creepy castle, playing a game to try to get his daughter to safety.

We had seen and liked Jürgen Prochnow in Schlöndorff’s  The Lost Honor of Katharine Blum, and he had just made a smash as the star of Wolfgang Petersen’s international hit  Das Boot. Prochnow is the only character given enough screen time to let us warm up to him. His Woermann actually has a sense of humor, praising Hitler’s victories with a slightly facetious tilt, that his subordinates can’t detect.

Gabriel Byrne wasn’t yet an established screen presence. His bad-news SS man Kaempffer is nicely understated — no foaming at the mouth. He really isn’t given enough to do. The real surprise is to see the great Ian McKellen, and barely recognize him. This reviewer didn’t really catch up with McKellen until his  Richard III, even though we had seen him in a film before The Keep, playing the writer  D.H. Lawrence. The disc extras report that McKellen was not happy with Michael Mann’s direction. He worked on a Romanian accent for Dr. Cuza, only to find that Mann didn’t even want the Germans to have accents. We’re amused to see that The Keep credits a dialect coach, because everybody speaks in a flat American accent. One might think every line had been redubbed.

Scott Glenn’s ‘character’ is a semi-abstract concept. Mann has Glenn pull his standard cold stares and stoic poses, leaving Glaeken seriously personality-challenged. Scott’s best roles employ  a sense of humor to prevent him from becoming a stick figure. If having Glaeken bed Eva Cuza was an attempt to humanize him, it doesn’t work. We get a tame, decorative and wholly gratuitous sex scene. The film’s final continuity puts Alberta Watson’s poor Eva through some impossible paces. She’s just been raped, and then carried away by a phantom monster; she must be in emotional and physical torment. With no preparation and for no good reason, she takes time out for a passionate, sensual encounter with a wooden mystery man. Were the producers setting the stage for a sequel, ‘Son of The Keep?’

Glenn’s Glaeken projects bolts of light from his eyes like  The Colossus of New York. He uses Jedi Mind Trickery to breeze through German checkpoints, but then can’t stop a quartet of soldiers from blasting him with their machine pistols. But don’t worry, just like the later  robot T-1000, Glaeken heals himself, like a self-sealing auto tire. Some sparkly green-crystal magic gurgles in his insides, and he’s as good as new.

It would be interesting to read a shooting script for The Keep … after all, this writer bases his worship of  a very flawed western on the basis of a longer, lost version we can’t see. The Keep moves in fits and starts. We never get a handle on the Germans’ attempts to detect or avoid the supernatural menace. The German footsoldiers ought to be frantic, with an unseen killer in their midst. The SS commander Kaempffer hates Dr. Cuza, but neither he nor Eva is closely guarded. The same goes for the stranger Glaeken, who just shows up in Eva’s room at the Inn. As the disc extras point out, the continuity evaporates. At one point we learn that all save a few soldiers have been blasted into melted muck, off-screen. Kaempffer discovers this after the fact, making us wonder how he could have missed what should have been a hell of a commotion.

Some of the disc’s pundits try to convince us that the final 96-minute release version was purposely fashioned for a ‘dreamlike’ effect, that all those disorienting jumps in time and space are intentional. No, it only means that Paramount wanted the film as short as possible, and wasn’t going to pay for the animation and opticals to finish Mann’s planned visual effects set piece scenes. This is why the climax is missing anything resembling a big showdown.

The promising opening of The Keep brings us to an atmospheric, expressive place where anything might happen. The film’s architecture is remarkable, an echo of silent German Expressionist settings, not an imitation. The little Romanian town is in a gorge where the sun never shines; the air is cool and slightly hazy. The quaint little houses are tucked up against the canyon walls. The Inn is one of those places that’s 6 times as big on the inside than it is on the outside. We think that Production Designer John Box’s work is really original; he had previously created grand settings for David Lean, Fred Zinnemann, Carol Reed and George Cukor.

The Keep itself is uniquely forbidding, a solid block of heavy stonework with a shape and proportions that don’t suggest its function — it looks neither like a prison nor a defensive fort. Its front is a broad stone wall. If the wide shot is a matte painting, it’s an extremely convincing job. Mann’s shot choices never let us get our bearings in The Keep, but every angle is interesting. Some of the characters are not intimidated by the creepy place, but we are.

The interior, with all those cross-like metal insets, has a completely undefined purpose. Smoke in the air adds a slimy texture to everything. Two greedy soldiers dislodge a stone, causing a pressure draft that reminds us of another movie scene, the archeologists’ unearthing of the buried Roman villa in  Fellini’s Roma. Kaempffer’s soldiers open a shaft to an enormous chamber going down hundreds of feet. It holds a who-knows-what Lovecraftian thing, initially just a manifestation of light and smoke.

The Tangerine Dream music score generates its own kind of atmosphere, with so many wordless scenes of people moving in the mist. The hypnotic rhythms work best in the more abstract scenes. They don’t contribute to any sense of period realism, just like the flat American accents. The film’s audio-visual impact is strange, all right: the little hamlet in the gorge, and the oppressive stone grotto that is The Keep, are a magical somewhere. The film’s soundscape sells us a dreamland nowhere.

We’re a big fan of many of the movie’s special effects. Shots of wispy smoke in The Keep, of air rushing from an opened chamber, light pouring out of gaps between stones — these are startling. The early manifestations of Molasar are brilliant — clouds of reverse-billowing smoke suggest a shape, with a ruby-red light glowing like the eye of a cyclops. We can’t get a handle on what we’re seeing, but it feels magical and powerful. The Smoke-Molasar carries Eva, a shot that shouldn’t work but does.

Some views of the more ‘integrated’ Molasar have a graphic impact: a blobby head in shadow that looks like The Hulk with red light blasting from its mouth and eye sockets. By the time Molasar condenses into a man in an impressive rubber suit, looking like an evil superhero, all the mystery is gone.

The disc has a short but telling interview with Peter Kuran, the optical and animation expert noted for wrangling ray gun blasts and light saber glows for Star Wars. Kuran says that The Keep was something of an emergency; with a couple of major effects scenes dropped, the show needed at least twenty of Kuran’s rotoscope-and-be-brilliant light show additions. Eyes glow, rays flash and the climactic talisman becomes a weapon that shoots out yet another ray. Although well-done, these are the least interesting visuals in the film, added to make it clear that Glaeken is a super-being, that German soldiers’ heads are exploding, that ‘evil energy’ is flitting about.

When the movie has fallen apart as a drama, and we’re trying to detect some mighty goal that Michael Mann missed, we pick up on some odd things. Father Fonescu produces a crucifix, which Dr. Cuza tries to use against Molasar,  Peter Cushing– style. Cuza is Jewish, and we appreciate Fonescu’s attempt to do good, even with this odd throwback gesture. We wish the male leads had a bit more depth. The show kills them off one by one; yet to its credit doesn’t settle for lazy nihilism.

For all of its great atmosphere and ‘architectural’ power, The Keep stays at the level of a puppet show, with the fate of the world (yawn) hanging in the balance. Fonescu cites God’s attempt to redeem men and Cuza insists that Evil is all human-political, but the fairy tale premise insists that Reality is a game board for Good and Evil superbeings in conflict. Vinegar Syndrome’s interviews and essays do their best to validate Michael Mann’s intentions.

Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Keep is a newly scanned & restored 4K remaster; the 4K disc is encoded with Dolby Vision. Rabid fans are aware that the original trailer includes snippets not seen in the film itself, but a disclaimer up front squashes the notion that the presentation might offer extra, unseen material. The official theatrical release may be all that exists.

There also appears not to have existed a longer ‘international cut,’ as was the case with the similarly expensive, non-performing 1980s fantasy  Lifeforce. If The Keep had starred someone as big as Harrison Ford, it might have been resurrected for revised editions as was  Blade Runner. No,the picture is an orphan, yet another ‘failure’ with a loyal cult following. It sent Michael Mann back to TV — where he promptly scored a major career home run with the style-conscious Miami Vice.

The 4K format really makes a difference on The Keep. Our only attempt to see it was many years ago on cable TV, or maybe a VHS tape. The pan-scan transfer made us think we were missing more movie than we were seeing. The inability of NTSC’s low resolution to deal with foggy and hazy scenes turned most of the movie to mush, leaving dark scenes nearly undecipherable.

On Blu-ray, and especially on 4K, the movie’s precise art direction really shines. The format yields more hues and more textures — we really couldn’t get enough of John Box’s uncanny settings. And of course there’s the ear candy of the Tangerine Dream music track. What can you say about a score that doesn’t always add to the picture, but takes on a life of its own?  It’s also plenty loud.

On this first viewing, we didn’t get a chance to look for ragged music cuts and continuity mismatches said to be tell-tale signs of last-minute editorial excisions. The Keep has always been a title we wanted to stay open-minded about; this edition is an excellent way to give it a fair shot.

Special features producer Elijah Drenner gives the show a full audio commentary and a battery of interviews, some of them fairly lengthy. We listened to several minutes with source author F. Paul Wilson, who notes that readers still think he wrote a vampire story. Looking at the way Molasar’s head connects with his neck, we think the monster is more like our old friend  Swamp Thing.

I was (happily) surprised when Vinegar Syndrome sent a limited slipcase edition of the movie for review — that iteration reportedly sold out immediately last November, in a Black Friday sale. The still-available standard disc set has everything except the heavy secondary outer box and the insert booklet, with essays by Bilge Ebiri and Caroline Golum and a reprint of a 1983 Film Comment interview with the writer-director. Michael Mann defends the movie: it is not ‘Alien vs. the Wehrmacht,’ but a manifestation of ideas about fairy tales as presented by  Bruno Bettelheim.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Keep
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good- Minus — maybe really just Fair
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Matthew Aspery Gear
Interviews:
Out of the Darkness with producer Gene Kirkwood (7 min)
Something Is Murdering My Men with The Keep author F. Paul Wilson (24 min)
What He Left Unfinished with VFX producer Peter Kuran(6 min)
An Evil Most Ancient with make-up effects designer Nick Maley (24 min)
Other Sounds for Other Worlds with co-composer Johannes Schmoelling (11 min)
I, Molasar with actor Michael Carter (25 min)
Still gallery
Original trailer
TV spot
40-page illustrated booklet with essays by Bilge Ebiri and Caroline Golum, and a 1983 interview with Michael Mann (but only in the sold-out limited slipcase edition).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: February 27, 2025
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