In this paper, we investigate the degenerative effects of antenna correlation and keyhole on the performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks. In particular, we considered a downlink MIMO AF relay system consisting of an nS-antenna base station S, an nR-antenna relay station R, and an nD-antenna mobile station D, in which the signal propagation originated from the mobile station suffers from keyhole and spatial correlation effects. We have derived an exact expression for the moment generation function of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio which enables us to analyze the symbol error probability and outage probability of the considered system.We have shown that although the mobile station is in a poor scattering environment, i.e., keyhole, the relay channel (S → R → D link) still achieves a cooperative diversity order of min(nR, nD) provided that the channel from the source (S → R link) is keyhole-free. This result is important to radio system designers since under such a severe scenario it is unnecessary to deploy a large number of antennas on the relay station (nR) but only requires nR = nD to obtain the maximum achievable diversity gain.