Michael Kenneth Mann, the director, is a man who does not require any introduction. His most well-known works include classics such as Thief (1981), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), and Public Enemies (2009), to name a few. Having said that, there is one film in particular that Mann would rather forget. We are talking about his British horror film The Keep, which was released by Paramount Pictures in 1983.
Despite Mann’s requests, this critically acclaimed film, which was originally 210 minutes long, was reduced to a total run time of 96 minutes. In fact, the final minute cuts featured numerous flaws, including multiple plot gaps, several consistency errors, extremely poor editing, and blatant scene and audio jumps. You may be surprised to learn that the movie’s audio mixing was never completed properly, and the film’s original release date, which was intended to be in June, was eventually postponed to December due to ongoing post-production issues.
Mann’s film was based on American writer F. Paul Wilson’s 1981 horror novel The Keep, which was also titled The Keep. Wilson denounced Mann’s film. According to sources, Wilson was so concerned by the final product that he wrote a short fiction called Cuts about a writer laying a voodoo curse on a film director for what the latter did with his work.
Returning to today’s video, we will discuss Michael Mann’s betrayed and disowned horror classic, The Keep, and go into great detail about it. Let us go on a journey down memory lane together!
The Soldiers Who Brought Death – The Keep (1983)
With a screenplay also by Michael Mann, the movie stars Scott Glenn, Gabriel Byrne, Jürgen Prochnow, Alberta Watson, and Ian McKellen in the leading roles. The film begins with a German force under the command of Captain Klaus Woermann arriving at the Dinu Pass in the Carpathian Alps post the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
The troop has been assigned to secure the pass, one where there happens to be a colossal, old, unoccupied fortress, which the locals address as ‘The Keep’.With Woermann taking a look inside the mysterious Keep, he discovers a multitude of large silver crosses embedded in the walls.
Inside, he also chances upon Alexandru, the caretaker of the Keep, who tells him that there are about 108 such crosses inside. Despite the caretaker repeatedly telling Woermann not to stay inside, the captain disregards the old man’s warnings and tells his men to camp inside. That very night, a huge silver cross lures Private Lutz inside the Keep, who together with Private Anton attempt to steal it. However, whilst pulling it from the wall, they inadvertently unleash what appears to be some kind of a spectral entity. The supernatural being kills Lutz biting him in half and as for Anton, he is literally torn into pieces.
The next scene shows us a mysterious stranger who clearly has some psychic connection with what seems to have escaped from the Keep. Although he isn’t introduced right away, his character is shown hiring a boat in the middle of the night to travel to the Romanian coast. In the meantime, the supernatural being has already taken the lives of five more soldiers, and apparently, there has been no answer on the radio for the transfer request Woermann has made. Very soon, the sadistic Sturmbannführer Erich Kaempffer arrives at the village to look into the matter.
Calling this whole affair a partisan activity, he simply orders his men to slaughter three innocent villagers right in front of their families as an act of group punishment. With Woermann protesting, Kaempffer informs the captain that his request for relocation has been denied. Taking command of the placement, Kaempffer sternly tells Hermann not to interfere in matters anymore and takes five more villagers as hostages inside the Keep.
Post the locals not being able to read out what looks like some kind of an ancient message, the local village priest insists on calling Dr. Theodore Cuza, a professor of Medieval History to decipher it. On the other hand, the mysterious man from before is seen making his way towards the pass to the Keep and although he is stopped by a few guards on the way, they are unable to detain him. The professor along with his daughter, Eva, is picked up from a concentration camp and brought straight to the Keep to decode the mysterious content.
It is soon discovered that the message is written in a language that has been dead for five hundred years. That very evening, Eva while bringing some food back for herself and her father is sexually assaulted by two Einsatzkommandos who literally tried to force themselves on her. However, the spectral being saves her, kills the perpetrators, and also goes to the extent of curing the wheelchair-bound professor of scleroderma merely by touching.
Eva is asked to leave the Keep and she ends up taking a room at the village inn that is also occupied by the same stranger, who has finally made it to the Keep. The stranger who goes by the name, Glaeken Trismegistus, seduces Eva and tells her that he is a traveler. As for the spiritual entity, with each kill, it starts taking a more corporeal form. It tells the professor about its origin of power and how it must be removed from the Keep, hidden in the mountains, and kept safe. The professor feeling grateful to the entity for curing him of his disease agrees to carry ahead with the task.
It does not take Glaeken much time to realize that the professor has bowed down to the entity. With him trying to make the professor understand that the talisman is what keeps the entity inside and if the spiritual object is removed from the Keep, the entity will be released into the world, he is only successful in infuriating the professor further. In due course, the omnipresent malefic nature of the entity starts taking a toll on the villagers, driving them insane. The professor tells Kaempfferabout Glaeken and Kaempffer immediately asks his men to arrest him and bring him to the Keep.
Later with Eva angrily confronting Glaeken, he tells her that the talisman belongs to him and that he has come to destroy the entity. He also tells her how he is bound to the entity telling Eva, “When he goes, I go.”As Kaempffer’s men break into taking Glaeken to the Keep for interrogation purposes, a shootout takes place between them, which seemingly injures Glaeken.
Inside the Keep, Woermann and Kaempffer have an intense verbal tiff amongst themselves when all of a sudden, they are interrupted by the noise of machine-gun firing and people screaming. With Woermann reaching out his cross, Kaempffer takes out his gun and shoots Woermann dead. Kaempffer makes his way towards the then-dead silent courtyard and shrieks in horror to find every soldier butchered in the grisliest manner possible. Kaempffer meets a similar death upon getting confronted by the entity himself.
As for the professor, he is finally able to locate the talisman, which he attempts to take out of the Keep only to get stopped by Eva who tells him that the talisman belongs to Glaeken and that the entity, one that’s known as Radu Molasar, is actually corrupting him and changing his soul. Of course, he does not believe his daughter but when Molasar commands the professor to kill his daughter and take the talisman out of the Keep, the professor realizes that he has been wrong all this while – the talisman did not belong to Molasar and the Keep was designed as a prison to contain Molasar all this while.
Well, of course, the entity reduces the professor back to his previous diseased state, and just before Molassar is about to finish off both the father and the daughter, Glaeken arrives, takes the talisman, and confronts him in what follows to be an intense battle. The end result has Glaeken exiling Molassar back into the deepest corners of the Keep, himself getting altered into some kind of light and closing the opening that had set free the entity in the first place.
The ending scene has the professor and his daughter getting help from the villagers, who are no more under the malign influence of the entity.
There is a high possibility that the original 210-minute cut that never really got to see the light of day actually exists but the sheer lack of interest by the director and the legal problems pertaining to the movie make this a disowned horror masterpiece. Call it bad luck but the visual effects supervisor of the movie, the legendary Wally Veevers, passed away right in the middle of post-production. Of course, this caused a major setback especially in terms of the end result because no one really knew what and how Veever wanted things to be. No wonder, a new ending had to be improvised. It is reported that Mann literally had to do close to 250 shots of special effects post the death of Veever.
Even with the background score, which is conclusively one of the high points of the film, Paramount Pictures could never really get the rights to the musical score by Tangerine Dream. In fact, the flick was available on DVD only after April 2017. But having said all of that, the late British cinematographer Alex Thomson certainly needs commendation for his striking work of visual composition.
Ask yourself if a horror movie can be beautiful and this movie is your answer. Right from the opening scene that has the soldiers arriving at the very first glimpse of the Keep inside, Thomson has been nothing less than terrific here. The fact that he has paid attention to every little detail shows in the closeup shot of Jürgen Prochnow’s character lighting up a cigarette right at the beginning of the movie. As for Mann, it is pretty clear that he never really wanted to make a copy-paste adaptation of Wilson’s book.
He wanted his film to be very different, he had things in his mind. Books such as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim inspired him to make The Keep in the first place. He often addressed the movie as an adult fairy tale but what one got to see in the theatres was certainly not what the director and also screenwriter of the movie wanted to create. Blame it on the budget issues, the constant studio meddlings as well as the production delays that eventually made the movie into a flick that Mann to date regards as a ‘butchered’ version of his original idea.
The Epic Monster Molasar Explained
So, in Wilson’s gothic horror novel, Molasar comes across as a vampire majorly throughout the story and then alters into something else in the end. Now, coming back to Michael Mann’s movie, Nick Maley, who worked as the makeup effects supervisor as well as the prosthetics designer in the film has this exceedingly hard task of not only creating the monster but also the makeup design for the flick. Well, in the beginning, Molasar was supposed to be this incorporeal being who would slowly take a form, one that was heavily inclined by the setting during his appearances. Call it a run-of-the-mill description but this is the idea that Maley had to work with in terms of design.
So, one can’t really blame Maley here! Also, to top things further, Mann kept changing his mind about how he wanted the creature to be. It is crystal clear that the director wanted full control over things, especially in the creature and makeup effects development. Apparently, he wanted the creature’s design to look just the way he had pictured it, which brings us to the vision Mann had in his mind regarding the creature.
Those, who have seen the movie will be on the same lines with us when we say that Molasar upon getting released appears more like this ball of energy that gradually starts to take a humanoid appearance with every kill. According to Mann, Molasar wasn’t just an evil force. He saw Molasar more like a pure refinement of power, one that can be used for good as well as evil. When he appears the first few times, you will have your opinions and then you will have more of them because let’s get one thing straight here – Molasar is extremely deceptive and there are no second thoughts about it.
The final look of Molasar is more like this seven feet tall creature. Maley and his team were given the responsibility of coming up with mechanical versions of Molasar but the hard work kind of went unacknowledged when Mann came to a conclusion that he wanted to have more of the creature’s presence in his movie. In short, Molasar was eventually turned into a man in a suit!
To a creature that initially manifested as a cloud of smoke and then looked more like some kind of a giant humanoid monster boasting muscle, flesh and how can we miss out on those glowing red eyes? Disappointing, is it? Well, we will leave that to you.
Controversies Around The Movie – What Went Wrong?
Well, just two weeks into post-production and the visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers passed away. This affected the movie in a major way because there was a multitude of effects that were in desperate need of completion. No one knew of Veever’s original plans and how he wanted things to be done. This drove Mann to redo the finale, something that was originally meant to be a spectacularly massive special effects-driven battle taking place between Glaeken’s character and Molasar.
Apparently, the production cost was already way above the budget, and let’s not forget overlong. But most importantly, Paramount Pictures was not really ready or let’s say desirous to grant any further amount. Therefore, Mann had no other choice but to go with what you saw as the finale in the movie!
It is also reported that Mann factually had to do close to 250 shots of special effects after the death of Veever.Yes, the movie did release on VHS, and LaserDisc and Paramount did have plans of releasing the film on DVD in the year 2004 but it did not really happen the way it was planned. The studio did not really manage to get the rights of the musical score by Tangerine Dream. Also, by then Mann had already disowned Paramount’s version of The Keep because to be honest,the studio did defile the vision that he had in his mind and the manner he wanted his movie to be made.
To make things worse, the audio mixing of the movie could not be completed in a proper manner and the original release date of the movie which was June to be more specific was pushed further to December – full credits thanks to never-ending problems in post-production.
The 3-Hour Michael Mann Cut
We have mentioned before in the video that the flick was originally meant to be 210 minutes long. But for Mann, he was only permitted to have a two-hour long film, which he did. Even then, the test screenings of the two-hour cut did not look that promising to Paramount so the studio ended up cutting the movie down to 96 minutes. Of course, it was done much against the wishes of Mann. In fact, the end-minute cuts had so many issues such as a plethora of continuity mistakes, plot holes, some extremely bad editing issues, and noticeable jumps in certain scenes and soundtrack.
Now, let’s tell you what all the viewers could have seen had the movie been 210 minutes long. For starters, the majority of the audience seemed to have a problem with the ending that’s on display. Now how would you react when we tell you that the original cut actually bragged a happy ending? The character of Eva was supposed to find Glaeken post his intense battle with Molasar inside the Keep, very much alive, and the trio of Eva, Glaeken, and the professor were all supposed to leave Romania together.
That would have been a much happier ending had Paramount not decided to chuck the whole chunk out just so that the movie could have a shorter running time. It certainly makes no sense because many still images of the original ending were already posted in magazines before the movie was even released. In fact, Mann himself amongst others had said in an interview that his movie had a happy ending.
Amongst the other deleted scenes were obviously the backstory between Molasar and Glaeken, the real explanation to why Glaeken and Eva fall in love with each other, Glaeken killing the captain of the boat that brought him to Romania, the caretaker Alexandru being brutally killed by his sons post the malefic nature of Molasar starts affecting the villagers. Also, remember the scene of the soldiers meeting terrible deaths at the hands of Molasar? Well, the effects for this scene were shot but it demanded more intricate and difficult effects, which just could not be completed after Veever passed away. So, shots of soldiers getting their heads blown off, were never really shown.
Oh, there’s plenty more but that will only make you feel worse!
Why Was This Movie So Damn Good And Deserves More Attention?
The Keep has Michael Mann explores the world of history, supernatural horror, and fantasy. The concoction of visually striking, haunting images with the background score by Tangerine Dream gives the viewers a recipe of terror, euphoria, and exhilaration all clubbed together. Next, you have an impressive cast – we are talking names like Ian McKellen, Scott Glenn, Gabriel Byrne, and Jürgen Prochnow, who were brilliant.
The cult appeal is quite comprehensible and even though, it might seem illogical from the story point of view, we know there are things that are evidently missing, characters appearing and disappearing just like that, a few dialogues not making sense at all but the movie does makeup with its mesmerizing visuals, the brilliant score and has Mann at his best. Mann is successful in creating a fascinating world of horror and beauty, one that is completely soaked in its atmosphere.
The Future Of The Keep – Will We Ever Get To See The Three Hour Cut?
Of course, there is a possibility that the original 210-minute cut that never really made it outside actually exists but we are not quite sure if we will ever get to see the movie that Mann envisioned in the first place. Call it the complete lack of interest by the director, the legal problems related to the movie that makes The Keep, falls specifically under the category of the story behind the film being way more fascinating than the real film.