Customer Reviews

Mansion of the Doomed

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This movie is prety gruesome but almost has no gore
or blood, instead by using some really gruesome
topics (eyeball transplants),a good music score
(though rather short and repetitive), and good
acting (Basehart plays it straight) this is a good
horror movie.

Gloria Grahame, the late Grahame who was a big
movie star at one point (like Basehart) is his
helper as the good old Dr. Chaney (Basehart) looks
for hapless victims to give their eyes for his
daughter who went blind after an accident.

His an accredited scientist who keeps misdoings
a secret, and lures people he knows including
another doctor (played by a young Lance Henriksen
early in his movie career), a real estate agent
and a prostitute to name a few.

He is only trying to blow his ego by proclaiming
new improvements in eye research which take a big
nosedive when his daughter starts rejecting
the eye donor transplants. Of course this doesn't
stop the doctor from getting more victims.

Of course that's another gruesome area as he doesn't
kill them, after plucking out their eyes he "stores"
them in his underground lab with other lab animals.

These scenes were the most chilling and most
effective as you see these people trying to get
out but not having their eyes provides a big
obstacle.

The ending is pretty satisfying though, and the
movie overally is good. I would check it out.

I was pretty impressed with this. Well the film has a lot to live up
to, being a carbon copy of so many other films in the small horror
sub-genre that might be known as "brilliant surgeon kidnaps victims and
operates on them in an attempt to restore his disfigured daughter to
her former glory". It's been done before, most notably in the beautiful
"Les Yeux Sans Visage", but let's not forget "Mill of the Stone Women",
"Corruption", "Faceless" and I'm sure I've missed a few.

But there are two quite good differences here: in this plot all the
duaghter needs is a new pai of eyeballs, and secondly, none of the
unwilling "donors" in this movie actually die after their surgery, they
are collected, caged and left to go mad!. Which makes for some of the
best parts of the story.

There are weak spots, however. Richard Basehart is pretty flat as the
twisted eye surgeon Dr Chaney (oh please...!) who has no thought but
for restoring his daughter's sight. He plays the role on a single note,
and give the character no sense at all of anything going beneath the
surface. At times I wondered of he had been studying the William
Shatner school of acting, as his mumbling and lack of impact got quite
annoying after a while. Also - the impossibility of the eye transplants
working is obvious very early on. Right at the start, Gloria Grahame
(as the doctors assistant/partner) cries "But it's impossible, it would
mean destroying the optic nerve" or somesuch agrument. The doctor never
manages to come back to her on that. And later on, in a scene that
actually made me groan out loud, a colleage sees a successful eye
transplant and gasps: "But how...?" Dr Chaney just smirks and says "The
real question is...why?" No - the real question really IS "how"?!! OK
those things aside, the movie does a good job. For all the poor
victims, it's a gruesome fate. Being drugged and then waking up in
a cage with both your eyeballs missing is a horrific idea and they all
manage to portray the right level of hysteria. There's even a great
close up of one victim's twitching empty eye sockets near the start.
Shame that later on the heavy browed "eyeless" prosthetics make them
look like a bit like they are wearing the "Scream" movie killer's
mask!! But the plight of these blind, caged victims is what makes the
movie. The fact that none of the actors could see through their eyeless
make-up probably contributes to their believable portrayals of panic.
In fact the character of the daughter almost disappears from the script
in the second half of the story, so small is her importance to the
tale.

The tension is well maintained though, and things move pretty snappily
-Dr Chaney seems to go through victims at an incredible rate. And if
you have any fears about losing your eyesight, I think this film will
definitely give you nightmares. Mind you so would the cover of this new Trinity DVD release - it's awful. Is it that hard to get the original promotional imagery on here, guys? This photo-shopped rubbish is just plain insulting.

A rarely seen movie from 1976, MANSION OF THE DOOMED suffers from a poor video transfer, but even state of the art technology can't compensate for the overall quality of this film. The late Richard Basehart (TV'S VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA) portrays Dr. Chaney, an eye surgeon whose daughter is blinded in an auto accident. He decides a total eye transplant will cure her blindness so he tricks her boyfriend (Lance Henriksen's screen debut) and removes his eyes, gives them to daughter Nancy and imprisons the now blind Lance in his basement. He is aided by his current wife, the late Gloria Grahame (a screen siren of the 40s and 50s). Nancy regains her sight, but it's only temporarily, so Basehart starts acquiring eyes from strangers, imprisoning them all in his basement prison.
The story's been told many times and this movie did mark the debut of makeup great Stan Winston and future director Andrew Davis (THE FUGITIVE). But the chills are few, although the scenes of the blinded prisoners is quite disturbing.

This is about an insane Dr. who was in a car accident with his daughter leaving her blind. He performs many eye transplants in the hope that his daughter might once again see, even against her wishes.

The vhs transfer to dvd is poor adding to the dreamy, creepy feel of the film. I won't give away any key elements here but the film is disturbing and at times stomach turning. If you are squeamish at all you'll want to avoid this.
The film is hard to shake. After I saw it I thought about it for a couple of days. It leaves an aftertaste. I found myself wincing while watching it too.

I love good horror and this would not qualify however, if you are searching for something truly different and creepy then this will satisfy your quench. Be forewarned though-it is nauseating.

Mansion of the Doomed (Michael Pataki, 1976)

Mansion of the Doomed is a truly, truly awful film, a remake/ripoff of Les Yeux Sans Visage without any of that film's style or atmosphere (Pataki directed only two films in the midst of his long and distinguished acting career; the other was the 1977 softcore musical Cinderella. Interestingly, writer Frank Ray Perilli, who is best remembered now for being the guy who bet John Sayles he couldn't write a full screenplay on a plane trip from LA to New York City; the result, of course, was Alligator). It would have faded into obscurity years ago were it not for two small details. One is that the film was produced by Albert and Charles Band, whose names will be instantly familiar to bad movie fans (Charles Band would go on to form Full Moon Entertainment). The other is that the film contains the third screen appearance of an actor who will also be very familiar to bad movie fans: Lance Henriksen.

As I intimated in the first paragraph, the plot should sound familiar if you've seen a certain better-known French flick of the fifties. A doctor (Richard Basehart) is trying to perfect a radical eye transplant procedure in order to save the sight of his daughter (Trish Stewart, a TV actress who never appeared in another feature film). This requires the procurement of experimental subjects. As his daughter's eyesight worsens, the doctor gets more and more desperate. (Henriksen plays a young intern assisting the doctor and enamored of the daughter.)

I will admit right up front that I thought Les Yeux Sans Visage was one of the most overrated films I'd ever seen, and I'm willing to allow that it's entirely possible that someone who liked that movie a lot more will like this one a lot more than I did as well. As that was considered extreme for its time, this was as well, but where Les Yeux Sans Visage shows mastery of pacing and some really good acting, this shows nothing but a flick churned out to make a quick buck. (This has become one of the hallmarks of Full Moon.) Worth seeing only for Henriksen's small part. *

In all seriousness, this is quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. It was on sale at FYE for $4.99, so my girlfriend and I thought we'd give it a try. We did so based on the DVD cover, which depicted a creepy surgeon's face with red eyes in the background and a huge, scary looking castle in the foreground. There was no original copyright date visable on the box; the reason for this was clear as soon as the film began. Because the movie was made in 1977, the visual quality is fairly poor. This wouldn't have been so bad if the advertisement wasn't so obviously intended to decieve the unsuspecting shopper. Another thing is the "interactive" menu mentioned on the back of the box. By interactive they mean you can choose to start the film at one of four scenes, depending on how much theatrical monkey vomit you can handle. The movie itself was beyong obsurd, even by '70's horror standards. The reviewer before me described Richard Basehart's acting as "straight". It was straight alright, straight crap. In summary, I think I'd rather have my [...] slammed in a car trunk than to be forced to sit through this garbage again.