UnowPriceless hyped garbage

SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Robert J. Maxwell Gerald Sanford, the writer, has given us a story about an unhinged officer of the law (Hopper) who kidnaps a rootless crime victim (Argento) and keeps her in a cell in his basement, where she must earn "points" to gain privileges. So far, nothing much original. "The Collector" had more going for it.But the script has Dennis Hopper delivering a couple of lectures to his prisoner which he pulls off with panache although, in fact, the logic is as twisted as Hopper's character. I wish I could repeat all of them verbatim but they go something like this.Hopper gives Argento breakfast and she dashes it through the bars of her cage onto the floor. When Hopper returns from work, he sees a rat nibbling at the breakfast. He blows the rats brains out. Then, in a patient but annoyed tone of voice, he asks her rhetorically: "Now, look what you've done. I make you a nice breakfast. You throw it away. A rat starts eating it. I blow the rat away. Who's fault is THAT? Is it MY fault for fixing you the breakfast? I was being nice to you. Is it Mister RAT's fault for eating it? Absolutely not. It is all YOUR fault. And I'll bet you never gave a thought to Mr. Rat's family. The starving Mrs. Rat and the little baby Rats." Hopper explains all this as if it makes perfect sense, no more complicated than one plus one equals two.In another scene, later, he tells Argento that he has to testify at a friend's Internal Affairs hearing. The friend, Officer Burns, gave a speeding ticket to a black man who claimed that it was racism. "I know Officer Burns," he says, "and he hasn't got a prejudiced bone in his body. He's even got a Jewish wife. He might even be a Jew himself. 'Burns' could be short for 'Bernstein'." When he returns from the meeting, he tells Argento, "Well, aren't you going to ask me how my day went? After I testified the judge asked me what Burns' Jewish wife had to do with the speeding ticket. I told him that I had checked the speeders background and it turned out that in the past year alone, he'd had other speeding tickets. Three of them. And two were handed out by policemen of his OWN PERSUASION." I won't give any more examples, I think, because those are the ones that leap most readily to mind -- and I don't want to stroke out laughing.Hopper, as Sheriff Krebs, is older and chunkier than we're used to. He was my supporting player in "Blue Velvet." Not that, as an extra, I spoke to him but we exchanged glances that were charged with indecipherable meaning. His face has plumped out a bit, gotten wider, and with his shades he looks a bit like the elder Truman Capote. He seems to switch smoothly from raging maniac to socially responsible sheriff and back again as the situation requires. A kind of Krebs cycle. (If anybody gets THAT pun, let me know and I will send you a personal check for fifteen cents.)Asia Argento doesn't really look much like anyone else. Everything about her appearance, from her plump lips to her throaty Italian-accented voice, seems to radiate a kind of feral heat. The first thing she spends her earned "points" on is a shower, which she takes nude on screen. All women in R-rated movies take showers on screen at one point or another. And the showers are not merely instrumental but expressive too. The actresses close their eyes and smile and loll their heads around and soap up their breasts. Not that I mean to devalue the functionality of the act. It's reassuring to know that these girls are so terribly clean.There's some kind of sub plot involving Hopper playing with puppets and Helen Shaver wanting to turn him into Buffalo Bob or Kermit the Frog or something. Shaver discovers the captive and tries to blackmail Hopper into becoming her permanent lover. This is foolish of her. You do not blackmail Dennis Hopper. Shaver gives the best, most modulated performance.Well, the story's ridiculous, though tense enough to carry an undemanding viewer along for most of its length. There aren't really any surprises in it. It could have been written by a computer. But there are a few minor gems sprinkled about in the dialog.

Claudio Carvalho In Redwood County, the dancer Gina (Asia Argento) is attacked and her boyfriend is killed by a maniac in a motel. Gina is attended by Sergeant Burns (Lochlyn Munro) and Lieutenant Krebs (Dennis Hopper) insists in giving a lift to her when she leaves the hospital. However, he kidnaps Gina and arrests her in a cell in the basement of his isolated house. The deranged policeman has a serious trauma from his childhood with dancers of night-clubs and establishes rules and punctuations for Gina while she is imprisoned. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Krebs is stalked by a local, Ruthie (Helen Shaver), who has a crush on him and wants to promote his amateurish puppet show with the character Deputy Rock, his alter-ego. Sgt. Burns is trying to find a clue where the missing Gina may be."The Keeper" is another predictable rip-off of William Wyler's "The Collector". This time, the captor is a deranged lieutenant and the captive is a dancer. The story entertains, but Dennis Hopper is too old and fat for the lead character. The heavy make-up on his face is highlighted in the image of the DVD. It is ridiculous the scene where a young dancer that is keeping her shape working-out in her cell is chased by an old fat man that is able to catch her. Today is a rainy day in Rio de Janeiro, and this movie was a reasonable choice for a boring afternoon. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Obsessão" ("Obsession")

scobbah The Keeper is a story about a young dancer who gets abducted and imprisoned by a corrupt police officer, who's assistant desperately tries to solve the case of the dancer. The plot is quite OK here, but nothing special or surprising. The acting by Dennis Hopper is great, and he really blends the movie with his insane character (officer Krebs). I suppose what didn't made this movie "do it" for me was the poor development here. It all starts out cool, but the further the plot develops the worse it gets. In the end, it feels like everyone and everything has just freaked out and what is left to digest is nothing. 4/10 because of the performance by Hopper and this movie might be "OK" entertainment if you have nothing else to do (or watch).

lazarillo The beginning of this movie really annoyed me. Asia Argento performs in a strip club, takes a shower, and nearly gets raped, all without actually having a nude scene! Don't get me wrong--even low-budget potboilers like this don't necessarily need nude scenes to be good, but it's annoying when a movie relentlessly teases the viewer with the promise of nudity but doesn't deliver (besides, it's not like Argento exactly has the pristine image of that other stripper-who-doesn't-strip, Natalie Portman--she's done nude scenes in movies directed by her FATHER, and supposedly had unsimulated sex on screen in her own directorial effort "Scarlet Diva").After the beginning though this movie wasn't THAT bad. For once, we have a movie with a believable stalker in Dennis Hopper. It's really stupid how in Hollywood movies stalkers always seem to be young, beautiful women (Erica Christensen, Rebecca DeMornay, Alicia Silverstone, ad infinitum), the people who in real life are much more likely to be the ones being stalked. And Hopper's performance as "Deputy Rock" is uncharacteristically subdued and psychologically nuanced. He isn't primarily interested in Argento for sex (although that element is there), but keeps her in a cage in what he views as an effort to protect her. He really is the straight-arrow cop he appears to be, just to a completely psychotic extent. I also liked Lochlyn Munro as the good guy cop and Helen Shaver as the woman producing an anti-drug show with Deputy Rock (who turns out to be just as crazy as he is). Which brings us back to Argento, who is probably the weakest link here, but she's certainly not awful. It's refreshing, for instance, that while she eventually fights back, she doesn't completely turn into the butt-kicking babe dispatching the villain with a stupid one-liner (a stereotype every bit as annoying as the old-fashioned "damsel in distress"--and even more unrealistic). Her character obviously feels morally compromised as a stripper and rape victim even before she's taken prisoner, and she has to overcome this as well as her captor. Argento can believably play a morally compromised character better than most big-name American actresses, so she's well suited for the role at least (even if she never does get around to actually taking her clothes off).