Here's an obscure one. Michael Mann is a director best known for his fast beat vigilante crime films, such as "Heat" and "Public Enemy". Once upon a time though, the young Michael Mann tackled the film adaptation of the novel "The Keep". The results were not so pleasant.
Clocking in at around 4+ hours, the studio demanded that Mann reduce the run-time and release a movie under 2 hours. After what I'm sure was a lot of debate, the studio finally released their own cut that clocked in at around an hour and a half. The movie was an incoherent mess and was derided by both critics and audiences alike. The author of the book went on record saying he hated the movie and Michael Mann was left wondering about the project that could have been.
Mann would eventually release his own cut to home video that was around two and a half hours. This new version gathered a moderate home video release but it was too late to recover from the loses. Despite the failings of the film, it managed to find a strong cult following thanks to the feverish idolization of the movie's monster, Radu Molasar.
Radu Molasar is a malevolent demon living inside an abandoned citadel whose primary goal in life is to kill off Nazi soldiers or anyone else who dares enter the cold stone walls of the keep. Sounds simple, but Molasar is not a creature to mess around with. Even though he possesses a host of supernatural powers that could easily dismember his prey, Molasar also happens to have a frightening physical appearance. Measuring upwards of a towering 7 feet with a body build that suggests he could snap a person in half just by flexing his bicep is enough to make even the strongest of men wet themselves with fear. This is not the ghastly spirit you want to pick a fight with and his eerie otherworldly presence in the movie only helps to amplify his already unsettling persona.
Oh, and did I mention he has no skin? You probably couldn't tell based on the picture.
Molasar is the very reason this movie is still talked about today (that and maybe the sound track by "Tangerine Dream")and is the sole reason why it manages to fit itself so nicely into the cannon of horror classics. If you are interested in getting your hands on a copy you're going to have to know some bootleggers or find a copy of the VHS because it was sadly never released on DVD due to its poor reception. Still, if you are a fan of movie monsters I eagerly encourage you to go through all the channels to hunt down a copy because Molasar is definitely worth the effort.
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