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Show by Rick Brough ' ' ' i . I 1 ii. s . 1 I i ca 1 ft-: I V I ''"I . V v ? fc lit A . i C' " : - - V--" : ' ' ; .) With her involvement in union activities growing and tensions mounting at home, Karen (Meryl Streep) assures her roommate and best friend Dolly (Cher) that they are not growing apart. Meanwhile, to keep up our interest, the monster shoots light beams from its eyes that blast the German soldiers to tatters. And the demon plans to escape the Keep by enlisting a gullible Jewish professor who sees the monster as an anti-Nazi weapon. Ian MacKellen plays the old prof in mummified fashion, and the rest of the cast tries over-intense acting to make the ridiculous story work. Director Michael Mann uses every gaudy device he can think of blurriness around the edge of the screen, blinding light and zap rays, and lots of dark shadows (which at least obscure ob-scure the gore). "The Keep" doesn't really need people. For a climax, the special effects ef-fects go crazy. f V A Classic Recommended Good double-feature double-feature material Time-killer For masochists v (,l"y J V2 Silkwood A natural screen subject is bolstered by a strong performance per-formance from Meryl Streep. But the script oddly dissipates the impact of "Silkwood." It almost gives the impression that her struggle against unsafe nuclear-energy practices was hard because it disrupted disrup-ted her love life. The opening is an amiable, but foreboding look inside the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant. The employees don't practice safety drills; there's no time for them with their heavy production schedule. The company doctor doc-tor tells tour groups that a radiation dose is like sunburn. sun-burn. Karen Silkwood and the other workers chuckle when the P.R. folks call them "trained technicians" they're just locals in a company town. Karen joins the union and surreptitiously starts collecting collec-ting evidence on safety hazards, but the picture flattens flat-tens out into domestic drama (as director Mike Nichols bathes the home scenes in shadows that are a contrast with the well-lit workplace). Her lover, Drew (Kurt Russell), complains that Karen is now "two women." See, she doesn't have time for him now. And their folksy lesbian roommate (Cher) complicates things by bringing in a snooty beautician. These scenes are okay, but not in a political drama. Cher's spirited portrayal catches your eye, but Russell's quiet lover, while good, tends to disappear. Meryl Streep holds the pic ture together, breaking away from her past refined-suffering refined-suffering parts. As Karen, she's got a down-home easiness, spunk, and an unaffected moral concern. And she controls the emotional temperature of the picture which tightens up again toward the end as Karen catches increasing doses of radiation (maybe not by accident). The picture is also affecting affec-ting when ii ws Karen losing her ho"ie. ircle of friends at the factory. (They want to keep their jobs, not ask annoying questions about safety.) With a script that only goes limp in the middle, and Streep's strong portrayal, "Silkwood" is worth a viewir" ,r: Testament "Testament" is a sincere but torpid depiction of life after af-ter the nuclear blast. In a quiet California suburb right out of Ozzie and Harriet, the residents are startled by the white-hot flash from an explosion miles away. A mother (Jane Alexander) and her three children (Ross Harris, Roxana Zal, Lukas Haas) must come to accept that an H-bomb has devastated San Francisco. The father (William Devane), who works in the city, won't be seen again, and all they can do is wait for inevitable, slow death. The film might be called "The Week After." The film (made in part for PBS) is more reticent and is made outdated by its ABC counterpart. coun-terpart. There is no heavy radioactive radioac-tive dust and pock-marked, hairless victims here. The suburb seems to be struck by some invisible plague. Residents turn hollow-eyed and gray, public officials become distraught, burial parties increase and the mother watches it all with sad-eyed calm. "Testament" tends to underline everything twice starting with Jane Alexander. The actress has a mournful countenance anyway. Here, she looks like she was born to preside over the end of the world. The movie dwells over two "testaments" Alexander's diary and long excerpts from home movies of her once-happy once-happy family. The screenplay doesn't have much new to say about the extinction of mankind. People become hysterical or angry. Young girls wonder what it would have been like to make love. Like Jason Robards in "The Day After" (which also suffered from superficiality, Alexander wonders if the early victims weren't the lucky ones. Occasionally, it offers some good ideas. The laggard oldest son (Ross Harris) grows up quickly. Carrying messages and aid on his bike, he becomes the only glue for the quickly-dissolving quickly-dissolving community. The town (named Hamelin) goes on with its planned elementary-school "Pied Piper" in a desperate effort to maintain main-tain continuity. And in one scene, you see Alexander tearing up sheets making, it turns out, a shroud for one of her dead children. (The scene has the delayed-reaction delayed-reaction wallop that the whole film attempted to get.) Like many post-nuke films, "Testament" can't match its topic. It sniffles into in-to that long night. Treasure ot the Yankee Zephyr This 1981 adventure is the movie for you, if you want to see George Peppard as a prissy villain, or you dig Donald Pleasance doing the most heavy-handed imitation of Walter Brennan ever seen. Pleasance plays a grizzled New Zealand trapper who stumbles on the wreck of the Yankee Zephyr, a World War II fighter plane that was lost with its load of Christmas Christ-mas booty for G.I.s. Pleasance mounts a salvage expedition with his young partner (Ken Wahl, the poor man's John Travolta) and his priggish daughter (Lesley Ann Warren, who gratuitously turns into a good sport halfway through the picture.) They are pursued pur-sued by Mr. Brown (Peppard) (Pep-pard) and the big-city villains, who know what the heroes don't that the Zephyr is also loaded with gold bullion. The dopey plot unfolds against spectacular scenery, accompanied by shooting, crashing, people falling off cliffs or splashing into lakes. The best sequence, an air-boat air-boat chase, apparently resulted in death for some of the stuntmen. "Yankee Zephyr" doesn't deserve to be taken that seriously. It's an over-punchy adventure. The Keep "The Keep" has a visual style like an out-of-control rock video. The actors express ex-press emotion by making the cords in their necks stand out, and the plot (from the novel by F. Paul Wilson) is a minor horror cliche the Nazis get their comeuppance come-uppance from a monster. In occupied Romania, a German combat division moves into a castle keep where the architecture suggests "it was not built to keep something out ... this was built to keep something in ..." Two soldiers looking for treasure unleash a monster mon-ster (who looks like an Oscar statuette that's been pumping pum-ping iron). A mysterious guardian (Scott Glenn) travels from Greece to vanquish the monster. But it takes him nearly two hours to set up a confrontation. |