THE KEEPER
Not exactly a keeper
If this movie were a fish, I'd toss it back. Chalk up another in the list of films that shame Canada with their origins. When I saw this on the shelves as a kid, I always thought it was the sequel to The Keep. Whatever.
Anyway, this one appears to be set in 1930's Vancouver (first shot: close-up of a BC license plate). It's a really hard-boiled Vancouver (ha!), where everybody dresses like a 30's private eye and there are kids in the street shining shoes. Christopher Lee, who isn't nearly as menacing when he's hobbling around on a cane that barely reaches his knee, plays The Keeper, a guy in charge of an insane asylum for the super-rich. The families of his tenants are getting knocked off, leaving them the sole inheritors, and...well, you figure out the rest.
Meanwhile, two men are looking into the goings-on here - a private eye and a cop. The private eye's name is (I swear to God, people, I'm not making this up) Dick Driver. The only name worse than that that I can imagine is Dick Ryder. He's played by some guy named Tell Schreiber - and this is his only credit, ever, in anything. Thing is, he's pretty good, for the first half at least - even though he doesn't look the part at first, with his boyish face and high-pitched voice, he's icy-cool and never once leaves doubt about his competence as a PI. Unfortunately, he gets lamer as the movie goes on.
Poor Lee embarrasses himself here - no movie can be all bad if it has Christopher Lee in a speaking role, but here he damn near reaches the nadir of his career (but no, it's not as bad as Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf). He can apparently hypnotize anybody, with anything. He's even got an eyeball in the end of the handle of his cane, which he gets people to stare into. In one absurd scene, he even hypnotizes a kid to forget everything he's seen at the asylum, when the kid hadn't even seen anything. (a rather drastic and risky move, wouldn't you say?) The kid also brings an interesting dimension to the film, seeming at once trying to unite the cop and the PI against the Keeper, and trying to play them off against each other, Red Harvest-style. He's not used nearly well enough, though.
Skip it, unless you like seeing Christopher Lee even at his worst.