Mansion of the Doomed, 1976.
Directed by Michael Pataki.
Starring Richard Basehart, Gloria Grahame, Trish Stewart, Lance Henriksen, Al Ferrara.
SYNOPSIS:
An eye surgeon is attempting to restore his blind daughter’s eyesight by transplanting new eyeballs, but first he needs some donors.
Mansion of the Doomed is not, as its title may suggest, a gothic chiller or a haunted house movie, but instead is a dark, almost body horror that could be seen as something of an influence on what would become known as torture porn three decades after it originally came out. It certainly ticks many of the same boxes that make the likes of Saw and Insanitarium the movies they are, as well as nodding back to past classics such as Eyes Without a Face, and yet it still feels very much like its own thing, especially when you compare it to its contemporaries.
Directed by character actor Michael Pataki and produced by Charles Band – so you already know what type of movie this is going to be – Mansion of the Doomed stars Richard Basehart as Dr. Leonard Chaney, a brilliant surgeon who is trying to find a way to make his daughter Nancy (Trish Stewart) see again after she was blinded in a car accident caused by her father. So far, Chaney has been experimenting with transplanting the corneas of different animals to great success but cannot seem to get the same results in humans, and so he figures out a way to transplant the whole eyeball. The thing is, he needs donors and sets about tracking down the perfect pair of eyes for his daughter, starting with Dan Bryan (Lance Henriksen), Nancy’s fiancé and a fellow doctor who has his own ideas about transplanting eyes.
Of course, the good doctor promises to make everyone’s eyesight perfect again once he fixes Nancy’s problem, but with his theories not quite working successfully and the cell in his basement filling up with eyeless donors, it all seems to be driving Chaney a bit mad.
Essentially a grindhouse version of Eyes Without a Face, Mansion of the Doomed is a grim and disturbing little movie that hangs on the central performance by veteran actor Richard Basehart – who could be said to be slumming it during this phase in his career, but a job is a job – and his exquisitely deep voice that isn’t dissimilar to that of James Mason, who was seen and heard camping it up in Salem’s Lot a couple of years later. Here, however, Basehart is playing it dead straight, perfectly encapsulating the cold and calculating surgeon who thinks what he is doing is for the greater good, but cannot see the evil in his actions, a performance made all the creepier by his dull and unassuming manner.
By contrast, Lance Henriksen hams it up with some gusto once his character’s fate is sealed early in the movie, but given the morbid tone, a little bit of over-the-top pomp is needed to pep things up a bit because Mansion of the Doomed is not a fun time, it must be said. Once Dr. Chaney goes beyond the point of reason, the movie becomes very dark very quickly, and the scenes of his unwilling donors scrabbling around on the basement floor with no eyes is quite startling, especially as the prosthetics and make-up are actually very good, which is great in one way because the meagre budget is there on the screen to see, but not so great if you are easily disturbed because it does look very real, and the expert use of shadows in the minimal light all adds to the effect.
But not being the campy ghost train ride that the plot and associations to Charles Band’s body of work suggest doesn’t make Mansion of the Doomed a bad movie. In fact, the twisting of expectations works in its favour as once you start watching it, it is very hard to not get invested in the story, and the script does roll along at a bit of a pace. There is no nudity and the gore is minimal, which leaves it to the actors and the filmmakers to carry you along with the earnest performances and clever trickery to make the movie seem bigger than it really is.
Being a low budget movie of this era, the visual quality is also surprisingly high, with the greens and whites of the suburban exterior shots looking bright and contrasting nicely with the blacks and dark colours of the basement, and the print is very clean overall. For extras, there is an interview with editor Harry Keramidas, but of most value is the 30-minute documentary The Charles Band Empire, covering the career of the horror movie maestro by the man himself, and really should have been longer as 30 minutes is not enough time to delve into so many genre classics with any real depth.
Mansion of the Doomed is very much an oddity, mostly down to its budgetary trappings, but somehow it works and the end result is something of a gem that needs to be rediscovered by modern audiences, which, thanks to this excellent package, it now will be.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
