Sometimes I miss the 80’s, or, at least 80’s movies and 80’s hair. You never know just what might turn up on Netflix and sometimes I’m not sure that even they know, but recently The Keep showed up as a streamable movie. In case you don’t recall (and who does?), The Keep was released for a short time in 1984, directed and written by a pre-Miami Vice Michael Mann. It was a commercial flop. It was released on VHS, but never on DVD or Blue Ray and became somewhat of a pirated cult movie.
Unfortunately, there have been few HP Lovecraft inspired movies that were ever very good, but The Keep, in spite of NOT being an HPL story, seems as Lovecraftean as you get. Set in the darkest days of WW II, a German army group occupies a small Romanian village and moves into The Keep, an ancient building that nobody in town knows anything about. The Keep is designed as a fortress, but not to keep anybody out. It’s meant to keep something IN. When regular army Nazis (led by Jurgen Prochnow) start to be ripped to shreds, some real seriously bad Nazis (led by Gabriel Byrne) move in to institute terror and they start to get ripped to shreds by something, in spite of their violent reprisals against the innocent villagers. Meanwhile, a strange man (Scott Glenn) has awakened and is coming with glowing eyes to the small town. A Jewish scholar (Ian McKellen) and his hot daughter (with her great 80’s hair) have been pulled from a death camp to read the ancient Glagolitic runes in The Keep and become ensnared by the force that is gripping the town, the Nazis and The Keep.
This is one strange, strange, dark movie. It was unavailable for years due to inability to get rights to the music, done by Tangerine Dream, and was once re-released without music (bummer!). It’s dark, evil, nasty, mean-spirited and dominated by a Lovecraftian force that is all powerful and just does what it wants. The story is part Mountains of Madness and part The Golem. The moody electronic music prefigures the Miami Vice soundtrack, but the atmosphere makes the worst of Mann’s drug villains seem like choir-boys. Some critics think this movie is completely unintelligible, but to a Lovecraft fan, it’s quite clear. I don’t know that it’s a good movie, but if you’re in the mood for something that plumbs the depths of darkness in the human soul and then completely overarches human evil with a blunt, vengeful force, this might be of interest. It’s both literally dark (lighting wise) and spiritually dark (brutalized Nazis) and the moody music makes you glad to come back up to our world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAqWOnXu18
