Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Please don't spend money on this.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I only watched this because Jurgen Prochnow was in it. This was as opposite to 'Das Boot' (that he was in) as you could possibly get. I couldn't believe it. What a shocker! The whole story is pointless and superficial. The characters are two dimensional at best, just vague outlines and either good or bad and the dialogue is simplistic and childish. Somewhere in the middle of this most unmemorable movie the lead female and the mysterious weird male meet and have sex for absolutely no reason as far as the plot goes. The sex is completely irrelevant to anything at all and the two characters have hardly even spoken to each other. There are a lot of pointless special effects that just look like something stuck on for the sake of it. Wow, Jurgen must have needed money BADLY to do this.

This movie begins with a German army squad traveling through the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to secure the Dinu Mountain Pass during the first days of Operation Barbarossa during World War II. Commanding this squad is "Captain Klaus Woermann" (Jurgen Prochnow) who is both competent and combat experienced. Upon arrival at a small Romanian village near an abandoned citadel known as "The Keep" he decides to set up operations. What he doesn't know is that rather than being built to keep intruders out, "The Keep" was built to keep something--in. That being the case, it isn't too long before German soldiers are being killed by some mysterious entity despite the best efforts of Captain Woermann. Not long after he requests a relocation point, a special SS unit arrives under the command of "SD Sturmbannfuhrer Eric KKaempffer" (Gabriel Byrne) who takes command of the area and decides to execute villagers as a way of containing what he believes is partisan activity. But there is no partisan activity. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie and risk spoiling it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this was an interesting movie which made great use of smoke and music to create a surreal atmosphere. Unfortunately, the director (Michael Mann) went too far with these stylistic enhancements which crowded out everything else. Along with that the special effects for the "entity" were clearly second-rate and that didn't help either. In short, the film had a good plot but lacked the necessary time to really develop which in turn limited the overall effect. Accordingly, I rate this movie as about average.

After reading Paul Wilson's excellent suspenseful novel (which I picked at a second-hand book stall in a remote Welsh village) I couldn't wait to watch the film adaptation… And what a disappointment!! The only thing worth mentioning is the beautiful cinematography. As for the rest, the script is laughable at times, the main actors are totally miscast and the score is totally out of place… An electronic soundtrack on a horror story set in World War II??... The composer must have been high on weed. Jurgen Prochnow was cast because of his new international popularity after Das Boot. The girl (who is she?!) looks too much like a 1980s disco vamp, Ian McKellen seems like he happened to be passing by (Peter Cushing would have been great in the role!), Scott Glenn looks like a zombie in a cheap George Romero flick, and Robert Prosky's character was totally created by the screenwriter and is totally gratuitous, since he does nothing of any relevance to the plot. And the monster looks rather like Predator than a centuries old demon. And now I see where Mr Coppola got the armour suit design for Gary Oldman's Vlad Tepes in his infamous 1992 Dracula from… If you haven't read Wilson's novel, you won't understand half of what is going on: who is the demon, who is Glaeken, what links them to each other, who built the keep?… So many questions without an answer, so many loose ends. I understand the film originally ran for three hours but it was chopped down to 90 minutes by the studio against Mann's wishes. They totally ruined it. Don't waste your time on this mess. Go and read the book if you get a chance.

It remains one of the most frustrating experiences for a Michael Mann fan to go through. The Keep is by definition a mixed bag, a collage of weirdness, tackiness and visual smarts that are great but in all honesty are in the wrong movie. It even boasts a cast of considerable talent, where Messrs Jürgen Prochnow, Scott Glenn, Ian McKellen and Gabriel Byrne lead off from the front. But the troubled production and numerous edits and cuts of the piece have left it as a scarred but fascinating oddity.Based on F. Paul Wilson's novel of the same name, plot is set in World War II Romania. When members of the German army hole up at a Carpathian Castle, they get more than they ever could have bargained for when greed unleashes an evil demon upon all who dwell in the vicinity. In short order the German's are requested to seek out the aid of a Jewish historian (McKellen), who is freed from a death camp and hurried along to Carpathia to help the Nazis. Then there is the mysterious Glaeken Trismegestus (Glenn), a man of seriously scary eyes who is making a journey to the castle for the sake of humanity.Now, there are a lot of reviews out there for The Keep, but since there are quite a few versions out there with different endings, it's difficult to know which one is being reviewed. But the over riding factor leans towards it being a mess of a movie. Wilson himself was greatly angered by the version he watched, which may well have been the original 3 hour plus cut? Calling it an incoherent monstrosity. This latest cut I saw was the "theatrical" version, complete with an extra "fan edit" ending, and I'm indebted to an on line friend and those "fans" who have given me the chance to see two endings that I hadn't seen before! Yet the one constant is Tangerine Dream's LSD inspired musical score!Mann is early in his career here and trying his best to make something thematically potent and visually arresting, but it ultimately is done down by mixed ambitions and budget restrictions, where no amount of editing and fog machine usage can mask the problems. In fact it's now thought that Mann wasn't even directing come the second half of the movie?! It was an experience that would send him away from the big screen and into other work for the next few years. Thankfully for us Mann fans it proved to be a blessing in disguise, for he would return to make a serious mark on cinema from the director's chair. But with that still comes the disappointment that The Keep is not the thoughtful atmospheric classic that Mann envisaged when he started out to make it. 6/10