I watched this last night on a twenty plus year old VHS tape I brought of eBay, under it's UK title 'Massacre mansion'. We open with shots of Dr Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart) walking through a hospital, he goes to a patient and inserts his thumbs into her eye sockets. As it turns out this is just a nightmare, according to the accompanying monologue by Basehart anyway. He goes on to talk about his daughter Nancy Chaney (Trish Stewart), we see scenes of her swimming in a pool with her boyfriend Dr Dan Bryan (Lance Henriksen) with Doc Chaney lovingly looking on. He also talks of an accident. While driving along a dog runs out in front of Doc Chaney's car, he swerves to miss it and he crashes the car. Nancy, who was a passenger, is blinded in the accident. Luckily Doc Chaney isn't an ordinary Doctor, no he happens to be an eye surgeon! Using his medical expertise and help from his assistant Katherine (Gloria Grahame) he sets out to restore Nancy's sight by an eye transplant. Unfortunately the eyes need to be fresh, which means he needs to kidnap people and take their eyes out. First up it's Nancy's boyfriend and one of Doc Chaney's fellow professionals Doc Bryan. The transplant works to start with, however Nancy soon loses her sight again. Doc Chaney needs to know what went wrong so he prepares another operation, again the eyes are rejected. After several more operations he is still no closer to permanently restoring Nancy's sight. To add to his worries his basement is rapidly filling up with his eyeless victims, who he wants to keep alive so when he has discovered the secret he can give them back their sight too. Produced by Charles and Albert Band (and not a killer toy in sight!), cinematography by Andrew Davis (who would later go on to direct films such as the fugitive and under siege), make up effects by Stan Winston (terminator, jurassic park etc.) and directed by Micheal Pataki, massacre mansion has quality both in front and behind the camera. However that doesn't make it a particularly good film. The central idea is good, Doc Chaney isn't portrayed as a monster, but as a loving father who becomes more and more desperate as the hole he's dug himself gets deeper by the minute. The victims aren't simply there to be used, the film shows them trapped and blinded trying to help and comfort each other, it tries to make them part of the film that you want to care about. There's no real gore in it, except the first transplant which is shown, the others cut away before Doc Chaney begins to operate, but various shots are shown on a black and white monitor that Doc Chaney looks at to help himself, it wouldn't surprise me if this was real eye surgery footage. Whats there is, is quite effective, and the effect of the victims having no eyes is also well done. My biggest problem with it is that it's all rather dull and forgettable, and a little bit slow. Not bad I suppose, just average.
Review of Mansion of the Doomed
