No-one's ever died here...

I know Michael Mann as the director of slick Californian underground crime dramas such as L.A. Takedown, Heat and Collateral. This cool crime style was an inevitable progression from his early TV days on the cult neon nights of "Miami Vice", brought full circle with the 2006 feature film update by the same name.

Always pushing the boundary's with complex real-time scenes and championing new technologies such as his use of digital cameras in his last few films. I have always felt that Mann was striving to create a very real and visceral film going experience. With the doco styles used in Ali and Public Enemies to the blood splatters on the lens in Miami Vice, these are all 'real' looking films.

So I was quite intreged to discover, after talking to a friend, an early Mann film I'd missed that deals with the occult, horror and Nazis. The Keep was an ambitious feature released in 1983, a couple of years before he started work on Miami Vice.

Sadly it isn't readily available on DVD and after missing a recent screening at the BFI I manged to find a small online shop called the VHS Preservation Society. They save old VHS releases by copying them on to DVD. It's a strange watch - looks and sounds like a video but it's off DVD. Good for nostalgia, felt like a real video nasty.There are some amazing titles on the VHSPS site and the good people at VHSPS deserve their own post. Watch this space...

The Keep is like no other Mann film, it's Gothic, it's dark, it's a fantasy and it's good. You can see in the direction of the Keep Manns attention to details coming to the surface. The live creature FX are convincing and striking and his use of lighting is great. His use of Tangerine Dream's slighty dated soundtrack highlights his intrest in using popular music in his work.

All the perfomaces are solid with Jürgen Prochnow, the nasty Gabriel Byrne and a sort of young Ian McKellen with a few other faces. There are also a couple of long FX shots that even by todays standards are mind boggling. One in pertucular of the abyss of the keep's lower caves took a second look. Pretty impresive.

Any Mann fan should take a look at this out of character film, as should anyone who is a fan of the dark and occult. F. Paul Wilson's weird novel might be worth a read too, some ideas about a bulding designed to contain a achent evil are great.

I'd like to see Mann make a return to this dark side of directing.

Woof...