MANSION OF THE DAMNED

d. Michael Patacki (1975)

Somewhere there's a film about a respected surgeon /scientist who driven by an obsession for discovery, or in order to save a loved one, breaks his Hippocratic oath and leaves his ethics behind in order to conduct an illegal experiment / perform an illegal operation. It all works out, and the doctor spends the rest of their life making amends for their lapse. This is not that film.

When eye specialist Dr Chaney's beautiful young daughter is blinded in a car accident,  he and she are almost driven mad by grief, and he sets out to make good his mistake (he was driving). Strangely, he picks on his daughters boyfriend, a colleague of his from the local hospital where he works. It's a odd choice as his sudden disappearance is always going to raise questions. It works temporarily, but soon he is on the look out for fresh eyes. He's not very good at the random murder game, so he sets up pretend job interviews and fake house viewings - later he tries hitch-hikers, winos and, in the creepiest section, abducts a young girl and promises to take her to Disneyland (when she escapes and he is chased by two men, he captures them and uses them instead). None of this works, and his daughter, now horribly scarred by excessive surgery, is utterly miserable.

Worst of all, the doctor's victims are in a conveniently placed jail cell beneath the titular mansion, sleeping on mattresses and constantly screaming and groaning about their lack of eyes. I'm a pretty peaceful sort of person (most of the time) but it took me about ten seconds of wailing before I started wondering why he just didn't kill them all.

Slightly murky, dreamy, the film only has credibility because it stars Richard Basehart and Gloria Grahame, formerly award winning stars between fifteen and twenty years past their prime. Oscar winning Grahame has little to do and, with an immobile top lip (caused by, ironically, too much surgery), has little she can do, although it's nice to see her (she died in 1981). Richard Basehart was a always a pretty good actor, slightly hammy and fruity, but of a tradition. Unfortunately, that tradition was no longer required in New Hollywood so he ended up making a hundred or so episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, a show that started out inexpensive and unpretentious and ended up cheap and embarrassing. No wonder he was drunk for most of the latter part of his life.

Finally, it's worth noticing aliens star Lance Henrikson here in an early supporting role. His early life was fairly itinerant and his education was broken up to the extent that he didn't learn to read until he was thirty. I hope he at least got a few of the classics in before this script arrived.

Finally finally, given its obsession with sight loss, shouldn't this have perhaps been called Mansion of the Dimmed? Well, maybe, I don't suppose it matters now.