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Stephen Moody as Stretch Armstrong, 2004
Another film I watched on satellite this week was Michael Mann's The Keep, a tripped-out, ultraserious '80s artifact, filmed with lots of Mann's (then) characteristic slo-mo and a pulsing Tangerine Dream score. It's horror, somewhat in the Poltergeist mode, with weird "living fog" effects and gratuitous exploding body parts, but nevertheless great atmosphere and cinematography. The plot weds a German-side-of-World-War-II, "we have met the enemy and he is us" theme a la Das Boot with a Lovecraftian evocation of occult Forces Beyond Our Comprehension. In 1941, a German patrol arrives in Romania to guard an obscure but strategic mountain pass; the captain finds an enormous stone fortress there, bizarrely engineered with the largest stones on the inside (embedded with silver crosses) and the smallest on the outside. "This appears to be designed not to keep something out but to keep something in," he says ominously. Soldiers begin dying mysteriously. Some late-arriving Nazi brass declare the casualties the work of a local partisan cell, and begin shooting innocent villagers to make an example, but the captain and other "good Germans" have figured out the culprit is a primordial demon eating souls in preparation for a big keep-break. Ian ("Gandalf") McKellen plays an ailing Jewish intellectual who makes a pact with the monster, not realizing that it is worse than the Nazis he hopes to vanquish, while brooding existential hunk Scott Glenn appears on the scene with a tightly-locked wooden box strapped to his motorcycle, ready to play his ancient, recurring role as yin to the monster's yang. Apparently Mann doesn't like the movie so it isn't the getting the DVD-release-with-commentary treatment it deserves: one supposes he doesn't want to take away from his really fabulous recent work, such as The Insider, Ali, and the soon-to-be-released hitman movie with that super-fantastic actor, Tom Cruise.
