The Keep

Michael Mann has never managed to take my breath away (not even with his best films, like Heat). Most of the time, I’ve had a hard time not falling asleep because his narration style is very slow. The reviews of The Keep are mixed at best, so I could expect how much fun I would have with it: little. And that was the case. The premise sounds nice, a mysterious castle in the Romanian mountains occupied by Nazis could be a great setting for a horror film, but alas. All those painted backgrounds, the dodgy special effects and the ridiculously looking evil turn those ninety minutes into an experience so tiring that even a five hour long Albanian existentialist drama would envy it. (07/07/2010)

The American movie The Keep is not considered Michael Mann's finest work, although I think it boldly ranks among the director's best movies. Sure, it has its weaknesses, although I enjoyed the mood it evoked more than other newer movies with better cinematography and higher definition images. As a result, I was mesmerized by The Keep. (22/05/2020)

The Keep unfortunately has number of things that make it an almost chaotic and boring slag. The characters are pretty poorly written, the pace is uneven, the special effects are laughable at best, and the music is annoying; I feel this is a premise that John Carpenter could do wonders with, he would highlight the trashiness in a creative way and would give a better style to both the heroes (especially the mysterious Scott Glenn) and the villains. But here we have Michael Mann, a precise builder of atmosphere and ideological conflicts, and the resulting film is not fun at all, but it does have an unquestionable aura and even a vision. The brutally strong back or side lighting and the permanently overheated steam machines create a surreal backdrop that literally saves the film and makes it quite a remarkable experiment. It’s as if Carpenter had left the narrative games aside and had a joint that awoke in him a desire for artsy horror with a timeless concept. It’s really weird and I’m not surprised that Mann never made another effect based film, but what I appreciate more is that a filmmaker as interesting as him has tried something so insane. 55% (22/02/2021)

The filmmaker's beginnings are very difficult, especially when he is shooting a horror film from a cardboard Romanian village with a plasterboard fortress, in which, in addition to the well-groomed Nazis, an ill-disguised Ian McKellen and a kind of runaway anatomical model of human muscles appear. The horror scenes are without doubt just as scary as the TV creations based on the motifs of Mr. Vašíček, the directing is indeed cruelly careless, sloppy and seldom reveals that Mann is a filmmaker with a distinctive vision. Actors in confusingly written roles have no chance to impress, and Scott Glenn literally feels like a bad joke. This is all accompanied by a hellishly archaic "casio" prelude to the TANGERINE group, and one cannot help but be upset that it wasn’t even stupider. Because this is not even a guilty pleasure, but rather just a kind of dusty swarm without a hint of atmosphere and meaning. (06/01/2010)

An atmospheric, not completely traditional B-movie with a superbly gloomy story. Mann’s style starts waving at you already in the title sequence with the arrival of the Nazis at the fortress and peeps out in each really good scene. I was a little surprised with the strange work with music, because that is usually Mann’s strong side. But here, crazy synthesizers boom away in pretty weird passages and sometimes it is disruptive more than helping to complement the visual action. No flaws in terms of acting, but apart from McKellen and Glenn the remaining ensemble didn’t get much of a look in. I mean, Jürgen Prochnow and Gabriel Byrne could certainly have got more involved in the action. As for effects, they seemed pretty impressive for a movie from the 80s. (03/05/2009)