RolandCPhillips

This is a compelling and interesting film but also a worthy and ultimately disappointing one. Like an Adam Curtis documentary it creates an atmospheric and morbid mood with poetry readings, synth-music and distorted images which aren't always directly related to the story. The opening twenty minutes establishes its calm-but-furious tone as the film reflects on a century of cyclical conflict ruminated on by interviewees. A pretty good start. But as the film continues it drifts more and more away from its central subject which is surely about the arms trade.

If one is being generous, you can argue that it's also about the behind-the-scenes 'diplomacy' and kickbacks which grease the wheels of the military-industrial complex, in which leaders claim to be trying to solve the world's problems but really just perpetuate them. This argument is nothing new, though, and deflects away from directly addressing the key subject: weapons, and why the arms trade is more immoral than, say, oil, food, drugs, water, shipping etc.

The film-makers line-up an interesting array of subjects including a roistering arms-salesman who you love-to-hate. That salesman sticks out because he's the only one who talks in-depth about corruption relating to gunrunning. The rest discuss the West's suppression of freedom in favour of its own interests. I had a lot of sympathy for them, especially Chris Hedges, but because of the way they are interviewed (the film-maker's fault) they only contribute to the documentary's sprawl. The producers should have spoken to people from H&K, FN Herstal, BAE, Rolls-Royce, Raytheon and so on. But apart from the afore-mentioned arms-dealer, the interviewees all support the film's point-of-view. An opening quote states humans aren't made of atoms, but of stories. This credo carries throughout the film and means we hear stories which have a specific place in history but do not add up to precise, focused documentary and make instead a vague anti-war philosophy.

In the end, the film looks are though it was overwhelmed by its own depression and broods on the horror created by the arms trade, not the trade itself. It also fails to make an important point: what can be done to make the arms trade more ethical and its agents more accountable? I don't know and although this film is worth watching, it won't help you understand better.

Romania, the Carpathian Alps, 1942. In this European backwater, a squad of German troops, led by Captain Woermann, occupy an isolated hamlet, with orders to guard the mountain pass. They enshrine themselves in the vast, lowering, Gothic Keep which overshadows the whole valley. Some of the troops make no attempt to disguise their boredom, and despite the warnings from the odd, reticent 'caretaker', it isn't long before two of the restless soldiers prise open part of the keep's heavily fortified interior, seeking their fortune. What they find is something else entirely other… One-by-one a malevolent force murders the men, and the beleaguered Woermann asks for re-location – but instead gets a squad of bloodthirsty SS troops, hell-bent on ferreting out the supposed 'partisan' threat. The local priest forces them to pursue a more investigative, by saying that a scholar, Dr. Cuza, might be able to shed some light on the keep's origins… Cuza, who is summoned with his beautiful daughter in tow, is Jewish. Meanwhile, a mysterious mariner, awakened from afar by a change in the earth, crosses land and sea to get to the keep.

And thus the stage is set for WW2 and man's various grievances and foibles to be played out in mythic miniature. The Keep was Michael Mann's second theatrical feature after Thief, his third if you count (the terrific) Jericho Mile. It pretty much flopped on its original release, and interest in the film is pretty small. There's been the odd screening on TV, a small VHS release in the UK in the early 2000s (when I first saw it), a big fan website being started up, run by a Mr. Stephane Pieter, the odd rep screening, and also a comic book drawn by Matthew Smith. However, the film's hard-to-find nature and its overwhelming oddness in the Mann canon has worked against it. Paramount pictures don't seem to have a great deal of enthusiasm for their film, so it isn't out on DVD yet. Furthermore, the writer of the novel, F. Paul Wilson, has never made any attempt to hide his disgust for the film.

The films is obviously the product of a stressful production in which there were to many influences jostling for dominance. This isn't to say that it isn't eerie, frightening, compelling or thought-provoking, because it's all those things. However, it's never any of those things for long enough. It's often a bit pretentious, boring and never as blood-curdling as Wilson's original book, which was a straightforward, no-frills shocker. What's odd about Mann's film is that while it strains for a sophistication above it's generic roots, it misses out on the un-forced passages of contemplation in the book, where Wilson ruminated on his different character's inner desires. This no-nonsense approach on Wilson's part had a crucial grounding effect. Without it, the film often comes across as a curious fairy-tale (in a bad way), and at other times plain daft. It's hinted at that the soldiers might be there to harness the monster for military use (why else would they be there?), there are nods Vampire mythology (Scott Glenn's magical weapon resembles a vampire hunter's kit and the monster literally feeds on the men) and Romania's relationship with German at the time, but otherwise the film is divorced from any kid of reality or genre. This means that Mann's big idea, to explain the emotional attraction of fascism and then confront the Nazis with the ultimate embodiment of fascism, which proves too much even for them, has no gravity at all: it's just rootless drama with no consistent stylistic grounding. The film's set design and cinematography do help him somewhat, though, overshadowing all the characters like much of Nazi architecture and enforcing the idea that human and supernatural evil share a common ambition to control everything.

Ultimately, the film fails to confront the same challenge all films in the war-horror sub-genre: how can you convince the audience that the other-worldly horror is greater than the evil of man. To his credit, Mann addresses in it in an original way, and tries to say the two are differently similar: the age old evil of 'Molasar' (never named in the film, but listed in the credits and faithful to the book), designed to look like some demonic Teutonic Knight, was born of hatred and a lust for power, much like the Nazis. When Major Kaempffer is finally confronted by the monster, he asks where he's come from, vainly trying to ward him off with a cross. Molasar replies with a weary condescension: "where am I from. I am… From you." This exchange, one of the film's more frightening and atmospheric moments, takes place in The Keeps main entrance, knee deep in the blasted corpses of troops Molasar has just massacred, bringing to mind charred, piled corpses of Holocaust victims.

The Keep is considerably more thoughtful and ambitious than the likes of Outpost, The Bunker and Deathwatch (films it obviously inspired), but in the end it's broken-backed film, because Mann fails to marry of the war and horror genres with the same success he had in matching crime and horror in Manhunter. At times, the film is simply too frustrating, or tedious, to be compelling. The Korean R-Point was a much more creepy war-horror movie, making the grim observation that the horror unleashed on its small island setting is cyclical, like the cycle of war, an idea Mann never touches upon.

However, The keep remains more than just an interesting 'curio' as it's often termed, thanks largely to the scale of the production and some truly draw-dropping visual effects: the Nazi troops passage through the mountain pass in the opening credits, with Tangerine Dream's distinctive score rattling in the background, is a triumph, and the troop's violation of the vast crypt, the 'camera' pulling away for an age, is magnificent. It's up to you if you want to invest the time, energy and money is discovering this little-known, little-loved but memorable film.

Stuck in that limbo between a being decent popcorn movie and a pile of nonsensical rubbish, Chris Nahon's enjoyable but disappointing tale basically conforms to type; it's as exactly as you would expect. This is film-making of the tick-box style. Young, attractive, impetuous and imperilled heroines? Check. Mysterious secret organisations controlling everything? Check. Secret, ancient war between man and beasts? Check. Special powers? Check. Imposing, super-powered female monster who's pretty on the outside? Check? Lots of running and leaping around? Definitely a check.

Actually, the film is a touch better than my sarcastic analysis might suggest, but it's over-familiarity proves to be its Achilles heel. Based from Hiroyuki Kitakubo's short animated feature made in 2000, it's basically a more frenetic adaptation, and though it inherits the earlier film's poor narrative, it lacks the anime's beguiling, sinister atmosphere. This would be forgivable if the new film's other virtues were more to the fore. Chris Nahon has a great technical team and all credit to the designer Nathan Amondson DoP Poon Hang-Sang who create a garish but claustrophobic world, and composer Clint Mansell whose thunderous soundtrack is mostly good fun. There's also a fantastic, old-school, stand-out ruck in a forest-set flashback when Blood's loyal retainer Kato takes on a fistful of sword-brandishing ninja, hopelessly outnumbered but (almost) unstoppable. It's a terrific conflagration, and lays the film's inspiration bare, harking back to the Lone Wolf and Cub movies in it's slightly grubby, grainy camera-work, occasional lapses in focus and in-your-face close ups. Watching the old, wounded man face his foes down with implacable courage is thrilling, and the choreography is imaginative.

Sadly, nothing in the film can quite match it. The rest of the fights are too rapidly staged and edited to be truly engrossing and become messy. Worse, the film's reliance of over-familiar tropes becomes stultifying. It lifts brazenly from The Matrix, Blade, Underworld, Twilight, Push and (unbelievably, in the finale) Star Wars. So much of its plot is recycled it's never very compelling. Worse, the film's 'narrative' logic disappears as it rumbles on. The basic plot centres around Blood's unending search for Onigen, the ultimate demon in 1960s Japan. She gains an ally in Allison Miller's tearaway air force brat, the tale beginning in an American base. A boring but serviceable plot, with an interesting military angle, you might think. Wrong: Nahon and screenwriter Chris Chow just throw incidents onto the screen, the non-existent story a framework for fight scenes. There's plenty of potential: Blood's tortured soul, her dependence on Blood, the references to America's dirty war in Vietnam and the military-industrial complex, Blood's convoluted family history, the allusions to alternate realities, racism. The list goes on, but Nahon has no interest in these themes or the vampire myth, and thunders (put less kindly, blunders) along from set-piece to set-piece. Given the lack of character, there's no real suspense.

The later fights are also run-of-the-mill, one on, in and around a stricken truck and the actual climax suffer from too many special effects: the earlier fights were more down-and-dirty. The demons are also pretty limp villains. One reason the Alien and Predator films remain exciting is because their monsters were make-up, rather that CGI, creations and they just LOOK more authentic. The demons here are just bundles of pixels, and the total failure to sketch the war between them and mankind means we never believe they're dangerous at all. Onigen herself is a terribly bland nemesis, another tall, placid, pale demoness you saw portrayed better in any number of 1960s horror movies. The ending, too, is opaque to the point of being impenetrable. It helps a bit if you've seen the anime, but otherwise is as confusing as the end of Silent Hill: Nahon either wants to leave the ground clear for a sequel, or is just an incompetent storyteller. I got the impression a good deal of footage had been cut out, hence the slightly disjointed construction, to hasten the pace.

However, the film remains a serviceable action yarn, and the first act (on the American air-force base) has a healthy sense of humour. Lower your expectations and you'll have a fun but forgettable time. A group of friends watching the film behind me called it the 'ultimate date-kill' when they were getting up to go at the end. I wouldn't go that far, but I don't think it'll inspire any company to throw themselves into your arms.