2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 4th

The Keep (1983) [Criterion]

I read a review of this when it came out; this I remember.  Pretty sure it was Twilight Zone Magazine, and what I remember is that the reviewer--would've been Gahan Wilson, who was an excellent critic--did not especially care for the movie, mostly highlighting where it was inferior to the F. Paul Wilson book it was based on.  Never did manage to see the movie for whatever reason but did find a used copy of the book when I was in college and so I did manage to read the book.  Gahan Wilson was right: the movie is inferior to the book.  The book, alas, is not very good.

I am full of wasted snark.  What I really was looking forward to saying in this post when I wrote it was that director Michael Mann makes the most of a not very good script by screenwriter Michael Mann.  But the truth is that Michael Mann wrote a three-hours-and-change movie and the studio wanted something more in line with ninety minutes, and so apparently there's a couple of hours of footage somewhere that includes alternate endings and fills in all of the many, many, many, many plot holes, and then it didn't help that the visual effects supervisor in a visual effects-dependent horror-fantasy film died during the production so whatever they had couldn't really be finished and executed the way it was supposed to be.

All of which also clicks with the sense that there might be a very good film somewhere in The Keep, trying to get out of it into the world in much the same way that the movie's monster is trying to get out, but it's rather stuck in whatever the hell this is.  Sometimes you see a movie that needs desperately to be remade sometime, and boy howdy is this one.

Another notable thing is that I never thought I would see a movie where the gifted actor Sir Ian McKellen is terrible, and now I have.  I'd love to blame the terrible old age makeup he's in throughout much of the movie--which is an ironic thing, seeing as how Ian McKellen is famous these days for, among other things, being a silver-haired fox, rrrowr, and here's he's gotten up in makeup that's supposed to make the then-44 year old actor look a bit elderly and all it does is make him look like he passed out at breakfast and fell asleep in his oatmeal.  But the problem isn't really the makeup, he really is just awful in this and so is most of the cast.

Scott Glenn, another wonderful actor, is also terrible.  The movie's love interest, Alberta Watson, isn't terrible, only present.  The only actors in this thing that are any good at all are Gabriel Byrne and  Jürgen Prochnow; unfortunately, they appear to be acting in different movies than everybody else in the production.  Movies, plural.  They aren't even in the same movie as each other.  Prochnow is in some gritty German wartime melodrama and Byrne is in some kind of camp rock musical somebody forgot to score.  They're both kind of great, actually, you just wish you could see them in whatever movies they were supposed to be shooting while they were actually shooting this one.

Speaking of the score, it's Tangerine Dream and it's great, I guess, only Wikipedia informs me that because of rights issues, the version you can watch on streaming has a different score from what was used in the theatrical release.

In short, it's a mess, just a godawful mess.  It looks great, except when it doesn't,  It has its moments, sometimes.  The soundtrack is great but apparently I haven't heard it.  The actors are all terrible except the ones who think they're appearing in another movie that isn't this one.  I'd love to blame the screenplay, but it may very well be the editing, which evidently is all over the cutting room floor.  This movie is no longer on my bucket list.

I guess the last thing I was thinking as I was watching this that I could mention is that I found myself thinking The Keep would be a great double feature with Highlander, which isn't meant as a compliment to either movie.  They're both cult classics and it's totally understandable why they're loved in some quarters, but they're also both messy, sloppy, incomprehensible shitfests of films that are possibly about vampires only not really, have soundtracks that are better than they deserve, and are bizarrely miscast from above the line to the bottom of the credits.  And are also both excessively '80s in a way that manages to make me nostalgic for the sweeter moments of my bitter youth while simultaneously being  terribly cringe, as the kids today so aptly say.

There's probably a joke you can make out of the title, something like, "Yeah, they should Keep this one in the vault," or "I'll bet Ian McKellen wishes the director would Keep this one for himself," but I'm old, tired, and lazy and you'll need to workshop it yourself.  Let me know how it turns out.