I doubt even the biggest fans of The Keep would defend it too strenuously as a good movie. The film is a total mess by just about all objective criteria, with an incoherent story, erratic production values, and sometimes bizarre performances from actors capable of better. A huge bomb during its brief release in 1983, I don’t think it’s too unfair to say that was a proper fate for the product as delivered to theater screens. Even without knowing any behind-the-scenes stories, you can tell just by watching that nobody who made this movie could have been too happy with the way it turned out.

Somehow, all that makes it fascinating. Despite its many failings, The Keep has the right combination of qualities to ensure that it would endure as a cult item over time. It’s an early work from a man who would go on to become a major filmmaker. It has some interesting (if not always well-executed) ideas, and is loaded with striking images and an appealingly moody atmosphere. The film’s long lack of availability on home video has also driven up demand from its small niche of supporters for a decent quality edition of it – which has finally now arrived.

Title:	The Keep
Year of Release:	1983
Director:	Michael Mann
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Blu-ray MGM+ Fubo

Coming off the massive success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the studio executives at Paramount may have been a little too eager to jump at the next pitch for a historical adventure story featuring Nazis and the supernatural. I’m not sure they entirely understood when greenlighting it that even the supposedly good characters in this one would also be Nazis.

Based on a novel by author F. Paul Wilson with a story set during the throes of World War II, The Keep follows a regiment of German soldiers assigned to defend a mountain pass in rural Romania that serves as a critical supply route for the Nazi army. Populated mostly with farmers and peasants, the small village they invade puts up no resistance to them. However, when the soldiers expect to station inside an unoccupied castle (called a “keep”) built into the side of a mountain, the locals warn them that the place is dangerous and no one has ever managed to stay the night.

Believing these stories to be a bunch of superstitious nonsense, arrogant German commander Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow from the exemplary war drama Das Boot) sets up camp inside the keep anyway. Before the first night is over, his men disturb an ancient, evil force that begins killing them off a few at a time. The Germans have no idea what it is, and nothing they do can stop it.

For a Nazi, Woermann is a generally sensible man who quickly realizes that they have awakened something beyond their understanding. Unfortunately, the disturbance draws the attention of a higher-ranking officer (Gabriel Byne) who’s far less reasonable in his response to it, as well as a strange dude with glowing eyes (Scott Glenn), who somehow gets summoned to battle the monster by using a magic stick. Other notable players in this tale include a young Ian McKellen wearing old-age makeup to play a Jewish professor who knows something about the history of the keep, and Alberta Watson as his daughter, who immediately and with no motivation whatsoever drops her panties and hops into bed with Glenn’s stone-faced weirdo.

Wilson’s novel was a bestseller that remains in print even today, and kicked off a cycle of further installments building an elaborate mythology about an epic battle between godlike forces of good and evil. I’ve never read it, but will assume it must be pretty good. The screen adaptation wound up in the hands of Michael Mann, an emerging director whose career was buzzing after the success of his Emmy-winning 1979 television movie The Jericho Mile and his debut feature, the 1981 crime thriller Thief starring James Caan.

Mann had very ambitious plans for The Keep, and flew off to Wales to spend nearly half a year filming many hours of footage. Production problems began with the filmmaker’s indecisiveness about how exactly to visualize many of the abstract concepts from the book. That his original visual effects supervisor died unexpectedly, leaving behind little reference for how he’d planned to complete the movie’s numerous elaborate set-pieces, left the director and crew in a state of turmoil, scrambling to pick up the pieces and cobble something workable together. That task was made nearly impossible when the studio, infuriated that the shoot had gone so far over schedule and budget, pulled the plug on further funding before the big climactic finale could be finished.

Nevertheless, Mann managed to assemble an initial cut that reportedly ran around three-and-a-half hours. Needless to say, the studio found the commercial prospects for something like that completely untenable, and demanded that Mann cut it down to two hours. When test-screenings for the shortened version went poorly, producers took the film out of the director’s hands and chopped it down even further, to just 96 minutes. Knowing by that point that the disaster couldn’t be salvaged, the picture was only granted a limited theatrical release in late December and was pulled from theaters shortly after.

Unsurprisingly, the resultant movie was ignored by audiences and excoriated by critics, deservedly so. Butchered to half its intended length, what fragments remain of the story come across as meaningless gibberish, with a plot that jumps all over the place from scene to scene and characters whose behavior and actions make no damn sense. For as hard as Mann and his crew may have tried to make them work, the rubber monster suit for the villain called Molasar looks cheesy as hell and the laser lightshow climax is terribly lame.

In the version released to the public, The Keep is, I regret to admit, a fairly awful movie. Yet that’s not to say it’s unwatchable. Like many other cult properties from the 1980s that may not necessarily work in the traditional sense of good storytelling, the film has other aspects worth savoring. In fact, it has a lot in common with Ridley Scott’s equally-troubled Legend (released a couple years later), including photography by Alex Thomson and an electronic synth score by prog rock band Tangerine Dream that both contribute to a very dreamlike tone. The production design of the keep itself is impressive, and a few of the practical special effects (notably the monster made of smoke) are fascinating to look at even when they aren’t exactly convincing.

Prochnow also somehow manages to make his Nazi character both compelling and even sympathetic. I wish I could say the same for Scott Glenn, but not enough is left of his performance to understand what he’s supposed to be or why Watson’s character would instantly fall in love with him.

While it definitely never comes together in a satisfying fashion, it’s clear that The Keep could have been a better movie if Michael Mann had been allowed to finish it the way he wanted. Sadly, most of the extra footage he shot has never seen the light of day, aside from a slightly extended TV cut that didn’t fix the movie’s most serious problems. Mann himself disowned the film long ago, and (despite his habit of recutting just about every other movie he’s ever made) has not expressed any interest in revisiting this one to my knowledge.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

The history of The Keep on home video is nearly as troubled as the original production. For many years, the best available edition of the film was a letterboxed Laserdisc released by Paramount back in 1993. Finding little financial justification to spend money on a decent upgrade, the studio withheld the movie from DVD and Blu-ray for over two decades. Little by little, that situation finally began to change in recent years, first with some distribution to VOD streaming platforms around 2020, then by licensing the rights to ViaVision for a belated DVD only available in Australia.

Another few years having passed since then, boutique label Vinegar Syndrome has picked up the rights for a full-blown 4K remaster targeted at the film’s cult audience. A surprise announcement timed for the label’s annual Black Friday sale in November 2024, Vinegar Syndrome released The Keep onto 4K Ultra HD in the choice of a standard keepcase or a fancier Limited Edition package. Both sold out very quickly, but due to a distribution bottleneck around the holidays, most fans only started to receive their copies at the very end of December and into January.

I was among the buyers of the regular keepcase edition. I hadn’t watched the movie in many years and was curious to see it again, but not enough to spend extra money just to get a slipcover and booklet. Ordered at Black Friday, my copy arrived in the second week of January. The keepcase version is a two-disc set with the movie on both Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. The cover sleeve is reversible, with new art on one side and the original 1983 poster design on the other.

Both the Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD open with a disclaimer notice that the discs contain only the 96-minute theatrical cut of the movie (missing some footage that appeared in a later extended TV version) and that the soundtrack suffers from quality issues that couldn’t be improved.

The new video transfer may seem to start off on a bad foot. The opening titles exhibit serious gate-weave, and the footage is heavily grainy, with distracting dirt and scratches over the picture. Fortunately, quality improves significantly once the credits are done. For the majority of its runtime, the 2.40:1 image is surprisingly sharp and detailed, with very rich colors and contrast. Occasional process shots look dupey and awful, and the photography by Alex Thomson sometimes favors soft focus and hazy diffusion filtering, but the movie looks quite good for the most part, certainly far better than the ancient Laserdisc master that was the source for most bootleg DVD copies before this.

In my limited experience with the label, I’ve found that Vinegar Syndrome tends to be aggressive with HDR grading – not obnoxiously so, but enough to feel that the picture may have been boosted and tweaked a little. In this case, colors (especially skin tones) are noticeably more saturated on the 4K Ultra HD disc than on the accompanying Blu-ray. I didn’t find this to look bad or necessarily wrong on my screen, but (depending upon equipment and calibration) some viewers may actually prefer the look of the Blu-ray, which dials this down a bit.

The soundtrack, meanwhile, has some big problems. Unfortunately, it’s always been that way with this movie, due the production being denied enough time to complete the original sound mix. Encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 format, the track has some decent bass throb in the score, but dialogue is often either harsh or muddy (sometimes impenetrable) and general fidelity is strained. Listed on the packaging and menus as “stereo,” any movie from 1983 should have been mixed for playback through a Dolby Stereo decoder that would extract surround cues during theatrical screenings. However, this mix has phase issues that sometimes exacerbate the poor dialogue clarity when processed through any form of Dolby Pro Logic or Dolby Surround Upmixer. In my testing, I got marginally better results listening in plain stereo with the upmixer turned off.

For extras, the 4K disc has an audio commentary by film professor and academic Matthew Asprey Gear. (The menus and packaging misspell his name as “Aspery.”) Further supplements are all on the Blu-ray disc. Disappointingly, Vinegar Syndrome could not secure the rights to any deleted scenes or additional footage from the movie. Nor did Michael Mann seem to have any interest in participating with a new release of his biggest flop. Nevertheless, the items Vinegar Syndrome has provided are worthwhile and informative.

These include interviews with producer Gene Kirkwood (7 min.), author F. Paul Wilson (24 min.), visual effects supervisor Paul Kuran (6 min.), makeup effects designer Nick Maley (25 min.), co-composer and former Tangerine Dream member Johannes Schmoelling (11 min.), and Molasar actor Michael Carter (25 min.). Following those are a brief montage of production photos (1 min.), a theatrical trailer, and a TV spot.

Of note, Wilson very much dislikes the movie and Hollywood in general. He attempts to provide clearer explanations for the proper story and mythology he created, but frankly they sound nearly as incomprehensible as the film’s version of them. Carter (who also played Bib Fortuna in Return of the Jedi the same year!) describes the challenges of acting while wearing a full-body rubber suit. The most interesting of the interviews is actually with makeup designer Maley, whose quip that, “There was a lot of peanut butter on The Keep” is quite hilarious in context.

Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.