EDITOR’S NOTE: The Keeper was on the CBS Late Movie on December 19, 1985.

Christopher Lee is The Keeper, the crippled administrator of a secluded and exclusive mental hospital known as Underwood Asylum. It’s where the richest and most well-known families in British Columbia send their mentally disturbed relatives for care. Yet these families are killed off en masse, with their insane relatives suddenly becoming relatively well-off. Dick Driver (Tell Schreiber) is the detective — Triple D, as it were — who is out to find out what’s happening.

In a 1976 interview shared on Reeling Back, Lee had praise for this low-budget movie shot in Vancouver, saying, “I’ve never come across a story quite like this one. The character is extremely well-written. It has so many different sides to it that I said to my wife when I read it, “Here, this is good.” I gave it to her to read, and she said, “Yes, it’s perfect.” I said, “I’m going to do this. I’d like to do this very much.” The story itself appealed to me as a story. One of the major reasons, if not the major reason, I accept a role is because of what the story is and what the story is about.”

Three years later, he was asked of the film in this article: “It was a little movie. Drake directed it on a $135,000 budget, 60 percent of which came from the federal government’s Canadian Film Development Corporation. After Lee had returned to London, “I received a letter from British Equity, passing along a letter from Canadian Equity, advising me not to do the picture. ‘They were concerned because it was a completely non-union project.” The film, one that had appealed to Lee, “because it was an original idea, totally original,” has never been released. “An actor never goes into a picture with the knowledge that it’s going to be a disaster,” he said. “I always hope for the best, and work to do my best for the producers””

The Keeper sat unwatched for nearly a decade before being sold to TV, and in 1985, nine years after its release, it aired on the CBS Late Movie. It was released on VHS.

Directed and written by Canadian singer-songwriter, film director, and screenwriter T.Y. Drake (who would go on to write Terror Train), this film features the detective sending his assistant, Mae B. Jones (Sally Drake) is undercover at the sanitarium, where Lee is putting his patients through their worst fears because, well, he loves to watch that. Then, Dick commits himself to learning more. If you could explain to me what The Keeper’s plan is and how he’s supposed to make it all happen, I’d be so happy.

You can find this movie, but it’s as close to a lost one as there is these days. However, it’s by no means a discovery. It’s…something. I mean, I had fun with it, but as this site should prove to you, I have a distinct lack of taste.