Thurs. the Looking Glass: THE KEEP (1983), DARK ANGEL (1990) and Planet Arous

Director Michael Mann's so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they Chariots of Fire their way through the fog, their white infantry ponchos fluttering behind them as they strive towards no finish line in particular while a haunting two chord synthesizer tune repeats over the soundtrack, that any semblance of story sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow is sufficiently war weary as the jaded Wermacht officer assigned to a remote Romanian fortress that was built into the side of the Carpathians thousands of years before recorded time. Colorful villagers bring the food and sweep up and wear crosses for der mudder's sake and never visit after dark or explain what scares them so. Since the Keep's been there longer than their remembered time, they don't even know why they're so freaked.


The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls, and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film is blown as well, like dust in the slow motion wind, sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light, illuminating mysterious spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls.


Soon the soldiers are all disappearing, fog machines are working backwards, and a mysterious shape is materializing Hellraiser-style through osmosis from the vaporized bodies of evil men. Prochnow hits the bottle as his platoon dwindles and bloody graffiti in an ancient text prompts him to send for an old archaeologist-linguist (Ian McKellen) currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp. The linguist brings his hot daughter (Alberta Watson), leading to attempted rape by some mean German guards who are promptly absorbed in a lengthy shot of backwards fog. Is this being the fabled Jewish golem? The original Dracula (this being Romania and all)? The thing is forming into a giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids, and is offering vengeance against Hitler in exchange for a small favor. The professor can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking. He's soon hopping around like the proverbial mountain goat, as old Nonno would say.


As this weird creature is so muscular he begins to resemble the Terminator, which then awakens the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn). From far away he senses a disturbance in the force and takes a slow mo boat at dawn up the Elbe at sunrise, scored to hypnotic synths as the sky streaks red, letting you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series, which began the year after The Keep.  Like so many shots in the film there's really no point to it besides future placement on Mann's reel. Of course if I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop from Amazon Instant Video (it's not on DVD) I might have just swooned away as I didn in Mann's Miami Vice feature film.

Anyway, Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep and now he's back to finish the job, even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, and maybe shag McKellan's daughter in the process for he is no sourpuss Christian god, and everyone knows the Hebrews have never considered sex a crime. No wonder they're so damned sensual!




Speaking of thick necks, what about Swedish Fulbright scholar and Karate champion Dolph Lundgren? A Swede with nary a trace of accent, he plays a tall anti-authoritarian cop in Dark Angel, AKA I Come in Peace. There are some cliche lines, a cliche lady cop girlfriend who is angry at him for not calling, and a cliche uptight yuppie partner. But the killer is all kinds of awesome, a kind of German Alec Baldwin on stilts with Wuxa hair, shoulder pads, and possibly stilts. Turns out he's a drug dealer from another planet here on earth to harvest our opiate-spike pituitary chemicals which fetch a high price at his home planet. He kills a mess of drug dealers with a flying CD, then uses their supply to shoot up random civilians with a crazy wrist snake device,  drills a hole in their forehead to harvest the ensuing dopamine gushes, and accumulates it all in little crystalline vials in a wrist pack for future off-world export. Man, that's about as cool a deviation from the standard alien drug dealer as I've ever seen. And brother, I've seen it all. I got lucky having not heard of this before the great Shout Factory blu-ray, so my first viewing is in crisp HD widescreen where the neon and explosions shine.

It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci fi fire power. There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies in a satisfying side plot that allows us to see them getting shot to pieces, and exploded, always a comfort in these harsh economic times, and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant, or something, ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown in to an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!

I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar in engineering, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!

It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase saturation. The drive-in era was dying by then, and where else was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the Hong Kong neon blue hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.


All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien being on earth to siphon the brains of people getting off on drugs (he avoids junkies, since their glands are often burned out). It works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example, that kind of thing, and it becomes a bit distracting. There's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense; if your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.

But hey, it was the 80s. Or rather, it was the last of the 80s, the final in a long line of films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension.  It's the same formula used in The Keep, though in that instance it came out the year before Terminator's release. So... maybe it all really began with The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) with Gor vs. Vol. Maybe... you seen that? Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver, descrambling this mess of alphabet called a post. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar in his dark contacts, ranting about world domination under the possession of Gor, that's something even a highly advanced brain like Dolph's can get behind.