The Keep (1983)

(Criterion Streaming, December 2022) I’m not one to demand movie remakes at the drop of a hat, or that special effects technology are, by themselves, a reason to update a film. But this being said… I’d really like to see a younger director (maybe Mike Flanagan, maybe James Wan) take on the F. Paul Wilson WW2-era novel The Keep and show us how it’s done. Because Michael Mann went at it in 1983 and the result is charitably described as… weird. The production history of the film tells us that things did not work out smoothly, that a chunk of the necessary material was left on the editing floor and that the state of special effects (not helped by the untimely death of the film’s VFX supervisor) at the time was clearly not up to the task of representing an ancient evil being loosened upon a fortress held by Nazis. Then the studio took over the film and kicked out the director from the editing process, which, as we all know, seldom ends well. The concept is still really good (and the novel remains tons of fun to read), so there’s a lot of unrealized potential here. But the film itself is an interesting dud—not interesting by itself, but in seeing how it can’t quite deliver on what it wants to do. The casting is surprisingly good (Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen), while the story includes both Nazis dying horribly and a Jewish academic having fun with that. Still, Mann is typically far more interested in visual sheen than in the story. (The released version being half as long as Mann’s first cut probably doesn’t help.)  It’s all promising until the film plays and it’s just… there, uninspired or incoherent. Promising but disappointing, The Keep is exactly the kind of film that should be remade—there would be no sacrilege in improving upon it.