A misfire from a very talented person. This starts off with a pounding Tangerine Dream score and dream like atmosphere as all these German trucks drive up the mansion and come across an old castle and you think “this is going to be great” because you know something bad is in that castle. But once the Germans unleash the Bad Thing in the castle it starts to get confusing. The Bad Thing doesn’t leave the castle but starts killing off the Germans one by one so some even worse Germans (led by Gabriel Byrne) arrive. Also arriving is Scott Glenn as a sort of mythical superhero – the way I tried to understand it was that he was like a good vampire and the Bad Thing was a bad vampire; the bad vampire even has a Renfield-type character, a Jewish doctor he uses as his real life assistant, because the doctor is understandably keen to knock off the Nazis. The doctor also has a daughter who has sex with Glenn – I think from the end of the film they were supposed to have fallen in love at some stage (they definitely have sex, and very stylized sex at that) but in this film there’s no emotional connection. Indeed I gather from reading stuff on the web about the film Glenn’s “character” was supposed to take this journey where he’s not been involved in the human race for ages then learns how to feel – but we don’t see that either.
To be fair, the film only runs 90 minutes and Mann meant for it to go three hours. I’m surprised this got made at Paramount in the early 80s – not surprisingly, the truncated version flopped. I would like to see a full length version but have a feeling that wouldn’t have done well either; the monster is too silly, Glenn too stone-faced, the girl character has too little to do, the plot too confusing to enable the audience to follow the emotional and intellectual concepts that Mann wants to explore. Clearly the work of a director with great ability – it’s got style to spare – but a bit of a mess.
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