The Keep

If watching Ian McKellan team up with a cosmic vampire who has the power to wield dry ice and roast Nazis with his eyes is a tangerine, while watching Ian McKellan's hot daughter have WWII sex with a glowing-eyed vagabond in a quaint Romanian inn is a dream, then, by God, only Tangerine Dream can synth up a soundtrack psychedelic enough to help us forget the fact this movie was probably made only after exchanging a few million Sunday-paper coupons for their 1/128 of a cent face value.

The logic of Italian horror films + Tangerine Dream = A hellish yet heavenly film. It's a genre film through and through, yet it chills the bones with its combination of visual richness (colour, fog etc.) with a theologically (and morally) driven concept. It's clearly the product of severe editing but the dreamlike results stunned me; that it's not on DVD makes me weep.

If Pink Floyd ever made a horror film, this would be it. Great premise gets ruined by overly drawn-out moments of "hey, isn't this cool" where I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be seeing. the strategy seemed to be that if it's not working, we'll just add another character.

Mood and tone not a movie make. I love the look of this, so cold and cruel bathed in a tangerine dream. The story is total gobbledygook but I will gladly dive back into the Keep if we get the missing uhhh 2 hours of this. Studio executives are the dumbest fucking people if you like movies.

This movie is a bummer. There are brief moments of brilliance that are scattered throughout and the cast is stacked. But with every new scene it feels like there are 5 before it missing so it becomes so hard/frustrating to invest in the characters. The photography & soundtrack are excellent, but as a whole the film fails to click. This really is such a sad case of studio interference. There are so many things at work, and with more time allotted to further explore, this could be a cult classic.

To call this a bit of a mess is an understatement - it is pretty clear that this was subject to all sorts of production hell. As a result, it is largely incomprehensible, but has the occasional moment that hints at what could have been. It is atmospheric and stylish, and features a strong cast, but problems with sound, effects and plotting pervade throughout. It's a shame we'll probably never see a definitive version of this, or even a DVD release, for that matter. A flawed curiosity.

A pretty weak monster movie with a cool soundtrack, a bunch of CG laser light effects, a metric tonne of dry ice, and a man in a monster suit. The premise is actually not that bad, sort of a cross between haunted house and Indiana Jones religious legend. And surprisingly, there are a few familiar faces (McKellen, Byrne, Prochnow). But the characters, writing and plot development are just so awful. I had no idea who was who, what they were doing there or why I was supposed to care.

No other film can best this in terms of atmosphere. It's basically empty once you look past that, but fuck does it make you want to care.

Great cast and a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. Ian McKellen once again runs into Nazi's.

This has got to be the weirdest Holocaust movie ever made. It's like "Death's Head Revisited" except instead of the SS facing reflection on their abhorrent actions by the ghosts of their victims, they are instead condemned by a symbol of the very blackness of their own souls. And these themes are embodied in uniquely fantastical, culturally vacant mystical forces. It's mostly a mess, but it has a good soundtrack, and the cinematography is tops, yet another Mann example of architectural reverence

this movie took some crazy turns, each of them stepping the horror up a notch at a time. loved the demon and the crazy hell land, and it had some pretty good special effects. you can't really find too many horror flicks like this from the early 80's

I forgot everything about this movie 15 minutes after I watched it. Not bad just forgettable.

Would make so much more sense if all dialogue was removed and it was just the objectively gorgeous cinematography and Tangerine Dream's score for 96 minutes. A must-see disaster including a bunch of decent Nazis, Ian McKellen playing Smeagol on a time crunch, and Scott Glenn as a mysterious angel/alien who saves the day with a mystical stick.

I think this is the best b-movie of '83. It is ambitious - it has almost 2001 Space Odyssey cinematographic grandness to it, paired with Tangerine Dream soundtrack. I would have been happy just watching these nice images with music. On top of that - gothic horror about nazis meeting devil!? That's some mad story to make into an expensive movie from. I wish I could see twice as long director's cut, but even the available cut is genuinely fun and original, no idea why people are hating on it.

A bit of a mess really.

The Keep just has too many ideas to actually form a functional film. It feels like it wanted to be a straight war film that took on supernatural elements because of a heavy-handed studio. It's not really a creature feature, but it's not really supernatural enough either. It's caught in a lot of strange in-betweens that just leave a bad film.

The coolest part of Thief is the 80s camp melded with slick Melville-inspired cinema, but if you take the latter away, all you have now is camp. I can't even imagine a 210 minute cut of this. It already sort of drags at 95 minutes.

Anyone who says Michael Mann can do no wrong needs to watch this because good God it is not up to par. It's not abysmally bad as there are some good scenes but as a whole it just comes across as an overly melodramatic and convoluted mess of a film. Despite the fact it has a superb principle cast and a great director it just doesn't work. I guess Michael Mann's style just doesn't work for horror in the same way it does for thrillers because Manhunter is awesome.

Yeah, I have no idea what this is or what it's attempting to do, but I dig it. I don't know the line of logic that led to Michael Mann directing a heady WWII horror film, but I seriously doubt it was sober.

No thanks.

A cheesy, self-serious mess that can only be enjoyed as a b-movie curiosity.

Viewed July 28, 2020. A true oddity.

Not a good movie but one that you can watch and imagine what could've been. Should've been an amazing horror/thriller instead it's a mess of unfinished scenes and editing. The scenes that give you the glimpses of what should've been are amazing and the special effects (that were finished) are great. A waste of Michael Mann at his peak, worth checking out for the few moments the real movie peeks through.

Pretty bloody boring.

This film is like finding out the Beatles released an album in between "Revolver" and "Sgt. Pepper's" that was just a mish mash of unfinished songs that was missing over half of their parts. I do wonder how much better this film could have been, even with the extra 100 minutes. At least the first ten minutes are great.

A hypnotic clusterfuck.

A movie that is different and very ambitious, but unfortunately fails on almost every level. Some of the set design and atmosphere is good, but the acting is terrible top to bottom (Glenn is especially horrible, but even McKellan is bad), though they can be forgiven because they have a bad screenplay to work with. The special effects are even worse, and much of the music is just odd. I happened to have read the book, which helped, but if you hadn't I'd imagine it would be incomprehensible.

There’s some decent imagery here, but that doesn’t help it not be pretty boring.

52.000

Weak, corny, predictable, hacked, corny

Up there with 'Dune' and 'On The Silver Globe' with ruined science fiction masterpieces.

Que belezinha, Mann fazendo coisinhas junguianas! Michael Mann: "There is a moment in time when the unconscious is externalized. In the case of the 20th Century, this time was the fall of 1941. What Hitler promised in the beer gardens had actually come true. The greater German Reich was at its apogee: it controlled all Europe. And the dark psychotic appeal underlying the slogans and rationalizations was making itself manifest".

It's such a shame this has been butchered down so much and never released on Blu-Ray or DVD or in its original cut. :( I wanna see that fuckin' fog in HD!

Cheap, slow, and over the top. The book was actually good though.

Wilson's strikingly original novel about Nazi stormtroopers versus a Dracula-like vampire in his Transylvanian fortress gets butchered but good in this moody, muddled mix of H. P. Lovecraft, _Alien_, _Raiders of the Lost Ark_, and _They Saved Hitler's Brain_. The actors are all saddled with so many different accents and dialects that much of the dialogue is incomprehensible, while the plot, with the revived vampire altered into some sort of personification of evil or something, is full of holes

it's total crap, but not without the typical b-movie charms. the 80s are in full effect here, nice, tranquil synthesizer soundscapes and these adorable visual effects. boy, did they love lightning and lasers in all sorts of colors back then. pew pew! woosh!

Very underwhelming. It has a few interesting visuals, but other than that this film is very unremarkable. The one thing I liked was Ian McKellen's performance. The worst of Mann's films I've seen.

what the fuck did i just watch? this was a michael mann film? this movie is a strange flick, there must have been alot of material that was cut out..Tho there are some great performances by Byrne and Mckellen and the story , which is not bad, a sort of indiana jones horror thriller set in a keep still looks weird end doesn't completely work, tho it probably has something to do with the budget(looking at the film it was probably quite low) But overall a nice try! And not a bad debut for mr.Mann

Real mixed bag of B-movie horror with some high-quality; occasional atmospheric moments and shots. Liked the synth soundtrack.

Oh my god this film was bonkers. It had no idea who the protagonist was and it Scott Glenn was pure narm

I want to see Mann's 360 minute cut.

51.000

I spent my whole adolescence trying to track this movie down after seeing it on the cover of a Fangoria back issue in a Midwestern comic shop. Couple of near hits at video store liquidation sales, couple of missed bids on Ebay and I finally gave up. Long after that, I saw it online somewhere, and meh. Kind of dull and cheap. Hovers around mediocrity all the way through, total disappointment. Looking it up on Google, that magazine cover wasn't really that spectacular either.

Trippy.

wow what crap, bad movie, bad soundtrack, bad editing. I liked the book it wasn't great but it was much much better than this shitty DUNE wanna be. Michael Mann is pretty hit or miss with me and this is most definitely a miss.

A basically decent idea for a movie ruined by ridiculous overdirection. Cries out for the MST3K treatment

As cool as it is shitty.

Extraordinary combination of war and fantasy fiction, not entirely dissimilar from _Castle Keep_ which had a similar exposition.

Boring. As. Fuck.