The Keep (1983)
Directed by Michael Mann
Set during World War II, a German army garrison is sent to guard a mountain pass in a village in Romania's Carpathian mountains and sets up barracks in an ancient stone fortress. Two of the soldiers unwittingly release a mysterious entity that kills or corrupts those within its influence, drawing the attention of a Gestapo commander, a Jewish scholar, and a mysterious traveller.
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What critics compared The Keep to
From Jed Kurzel’s thundering score to the SS goon who takes the time to spit on a small boy’s baseball, Overlord bombasts its way through its mondo sub-genre, with a sign that reads “Moreau”, an imposing keep that recalls, well, Michael Mann’s The Keep , and several direct lifts from Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
But it’s fun in its own lowbrow way, and makes a nice complement to an undeservedly forgotten lark from 1983—Michael Mann’s goofy “The Keep,” in which Nazi troops in Romania had to contend with an evil force haunting their mountain fortress.
You know, be able to happily declare that this bit here is reminiscent of Michael Mann's The Keep (a conscious influence Cosmatos acknowledges), that bit there of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (which he does not).
The story is essentially a riff on The Keep (1983), with an evil force locked inside a Central European castle, potentially unleashed by the effects of the WWII: in this case, the demon had been contained long ago, but an Axis bombing raid reopened the gates to Hell.
Hardy steeps the whole Romanian excursion in gothic ground mists, with forests of inverted crosses, muttering peasants down at the Hammer Films inn, bells attached to graves so that the prematurely buried can summon help (when they all tinkle at once, panic ensues), an impressively castle-like convent which has a few things in common with Michael Mann’s The Keep (it’s more prison than church), and a plethora of veiled, wimpled, looming figures.
But even Ang Lee had “Gemini Man” and Michael Mann likewise had “The Keep,” a fully committed misstep needn’t be overblown this early in a filmmaker’s career, perhaps lowered expectations going into his next feature is something we all could use.
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If the one constant of Mann's cinema is that a man with a certain code is placed into a situation where that code is in crisis - and it seems perfectly easy to me to apply that theme to each and every one of his features, from the TV movie The Jericho Mile through the otherwise uncharacteristic period films The Keep and The Last of the Mohicans , all the way up to Ali 's story of a man who gives up success for his beliefs - we find in Collateral a variation on that theme that gives it added interest, coming so far into his career: in this movie, we have a man with a code who is a bad man, and a man with no particular code being forced, at long last, to develop such a code.
In hindsight, knowing the kind of film that Michael Mann "ought" to make, The Keep seems like an inexplicably bizarre tangent for the future director of Heat and Collateral , wedged into his filmography like a square peg in a round hole to a degree that The Last of the Mohicans dares not even dream about.
While it's preferable to Mann's "The Keep" and "Ali", it's still nothing for 'ol Michael to write home about.
Mandy mixes visual and musical cues from films like The Keep with an extraordinary amount of blood, a surreal twist on classic evil-cult tropes, and Nic Cage in full wild-eyed rampage mode.
And while there is the slightest tendency towards experimentation in The Keep , with its unusual reliance on unusually close medium shots, that's really not the kind of thing that I'm referring to.
Manhunter was written and directed by Michael Mann, who at that point was known chiefly for his television success with Miami Vice; his previous two features, Thief and The Keep, were non-starters.
Dino De Laurentiis was involved in this, changing the title from Red Dragon , and being his usual hamfisted self, but Michael Mann was coming in hot from TV’s Miami Vice (he’d previously directed Thief and The Keep before that show caught fire).
The guy has made one great film (“Last of the Mohicans”), several really good ones (“Heat”, “Thief”, “The Insider”, this), but also absolute turds like “The Keep”, “Miami Vice”, and “Public Enemies”.
Here, he serves as writer-director, as he did with his previous theatrical features, Thief and The Keep .
Seemingly not that interested in the horror genre ( The Keep notwithstanding), Red Dragon makes the easiest case for Mann to sidestep the horrific in favor of the psychological.
Mann made a couple of the best crime dramas of the past 25 years with Thief (1981) and Heat (1995), so nothing prepared me for the abomination that is Miami Vice, which easily replaces The Keep (1983) as Mann's career nadir.
Michael Mann's career has spanned television and film over four decades and close to forty years ("Miami Vice," "Ali," "The Insider," "Heat," "Last of the Mohicans," "Manhunter," "Thief").
Mann is a director who favors action over exposition, admittedly, but he's also not really a director who tends to dismiss narrative outright; not even the hugely sloppy Miami Vice is quite as much a shambles as this.
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The gothic horror of The Keep, the cop/crook conflict of Heat, the historical drama of The Last of the Mohicans -- all were treated as Very Important Films, sometimes through sprawling running times, sometimes through lingering slow-motion images.
Michael Mann's career has spanned television and film over four decades and close to forty years ("Miami Vice," "Ali," "The Insider," "Heat," "Last of the Mohicans," "Manhunter," "Thief").