When Nazis Aren't the Only Bad Guys: The Keep

Conventional wisdom is that the book is better than the movie. Always. But can a movie be so inept and poorly conceived that it makes one want to avoid the book at all cost? Surely the odds are in the books favor that it will be better. But here I was, wondering how bad the book has to be to yield a movie so uninteresting. There was no benefit of the doubt even though I've seen Will Smith version I Am Legend and it's a travesty of an adaptation that totally misses the point of the novella. Yes, people screw up adaptations all the time. Why was I already hating on the novel? It does my mind good and makes me curious about source material that the writer, F. Paul Wilson found the film to be incomprehensible (in it's theatrical release. Allegedly, the first cut was 3.5 hours[!]).



The plot, as near as I can tell, is that Nazi soldiers are stationed at a deserted citadel in which no one has ever died, but no one has ever lasted spending the night either. Some greedy treasure-hunting soldiers dig out a silver cross and unlock something from within that seems only set on killing Nazis. There's a Jewish historian brought in from a death camp to help figure out what's going on. A guy with glowing eyes has sex with the historian's daughter. Smoke billows, heads explode, one man is healed... it's a mess.

There's a surprising pedigree involved with The Keep, or I should say much of the cast and the director would go on to much bigger things or at least consistent work: Michael Mann, Ian McKellen, Gabriel Byrne, Jurgen Prochnow, Scott Glenn. And the acting is mostly good (though Ian McKellen somehow looks like he's dressed in his father's clothes even though he was in his 40's when this film was made). The directing his accomplished and there are some Michael Mann flourishes. The sets are pretty cool and there's a number of sweet mattes (and an awesome laser show at the end).

But as I said, the story is a mess. Nothing makes sense and not in the good way when something supernatural is happening. There really is no specific place to begin. You just have to watch the movie, but I don't recommend it. It's a movie that takes the bold step of making the Nazis the bad guys. It's got some pretty bad dubbing even though everyone is speaking English and it was shot on a set. There's a go-nowhere love story and the final duel is anticlimactic, laser show or no. And it breaks one of the cardinal rules of the movies: never explode a head before the finale. Everything that comes after that moment is just a letdown. It happens in Scanners and it happens here.

Still... awesome poster.