Full Moon by the Numbers #1: Mansion of the Doomed (1976)

Cody is making his way through all 400+ movies made by Charles Band. This time, Band's first horror movie.

Charles Band really wanted to get his filmmaking career started with a horror movie, but he was convinced by his stand-up comedian friend Frank Ray Perilli to direct a comedy, a parody of Last Tango in Paris, instead. The result, Last Foxtrot in Burbank, was such a disaster that Band tried to bury it for decades, telling people that director Carlo Bokino was actually lead actor Michael Pataki (who was already hiding behind the pseudonym Michael Loveman for his on-screen performance). But Bokino was Band, and he reluctantly accepted the ‘73 comedy onto his filmography many years later.

A couple of years after the Last Foxtrot in Burbank ordeal, Band raised some money by selling people leather-bound copies of the New York Times that were published on their birthdays and used that to finally bring his horror idea to the screen. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel he was ready to direct (another) movie yet, so he passed the helm over to... none other than Foxtrot scapegoat Michael Pataki, making his own feature directorial debut.

Perilli had written Foxtrot, and he did the same for Band’s horror movie, which was developed under the title The Eyes of Dr. Chaney but had been retitled Mansion of the Doomed by the time distributor Group 1 sent it out to theatres and drive-ins across the United States. (Another title, Massacre Mansion, came along once the movie hit home video in the UK.) For cinematographer, Band and Pataki chose Andrew Davis, who would go on to direct action classics like Under Siege and The Fugitive, and the special effects were provided by future Oscar winner Stan Winston.

The story is basically a reworking of the 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, which was about a young woman who spends her days hidden away in her father’s mansion, a mask covering her features. Beneath the mask, her face has been mangled and torn away, the result of a car accident. Her father, Doctor Génessier, has taken it upon himself to fix her condition... which he sets out to do by abducting young women and removing their faces to graft them onto Christiane’s face. 

In this case, the young woman is Nancy Chaney (Trish Stewart, who did a lot of television in the ‘70s and ‘80s), who lost her eyesight in a car accident. Her father, Los Angeles surgeon Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart), is obsessed with finding a way to restore her sight. Miniature video cameras inside glass eyes? An animal corneal transplant? No, these won’t do. He needs to conduct a full human eye transplant to give Nancy back her sight.

The heartbroken Nancy has isolated herself and broken up with her former fiancé, Dr. Dan Bryan (future genre icon Lance Henriksen)... who is Dr. Chaney’s first choice for an eye donor. He removes Dan’s eyes and keeps the man locked in an electrified cage in his basement. Dr. Chaney and his daughter, who doesn’t know where her new eyes came from, are both thrilled when the transplant works, although Nancy is disappointed to discover that Dan seems to have gone missing. Unfortunately, her blindness returns after just a few days.

So, with the help of his assistant Katherine (Gloria Grahame, whose career stretched back to the 1940s), Dr. Chaney starts harvesting eyes from a variety of women he doesn’t think will be missed, keeping all of his sightless victims locked in the basement. Katherine suggests that he should just kill them off, but Dr. Chaney is deluded enough to think that he’ll be able to help them and give them their sight back someday. He just needs to fix Nancy’s condition first.

The creepiest moment comes when Dr. Chaney approaches a little girl at a playground and talks her into leaving with him, promising he’ll take her to Disneyland. Thankfully, she manages to escape from his clutches before he can add her to his dungeon of horrors. That little girl shares her name with the actress who played her, Libby Chase. Chase only has one other acting credit to her name: Dracula’s Dog, which was released the following year. That one reunited her with Pataki (who plays her father) and was directed by Band’s father, Albert Band, from another script by Perilli.

Richard Basehart did a great job as the crazy doctor, which is no surprise given the fact that, like Grahame, he was already thirty years into his career by this point. Basehart didn’t do much horror, but he proved here that he could be creepy with the best of them. His voice is probably familiar to a lot of ‘80s TV watchers, as he would go on to provide the opening narration for Knight Rider before passing away in 1984. The show kept using his voice for two years after his death.

But Basehart’s TV cred doesn’t stand up to the powers of TV legend Vic Tayback, so when Tayback shows up in Mansion of the Doomed as detective, we know the walls are starting to close in on Dr. Chaney, even if Tayback won’t be the one to bring him to justice.

Mansion of the Doomed is a dark and twisted movie with a discomforting atmosphere. I found it very difficult to get into at first, as the opening stretch is quite disjointed: a nightmare, mixed with flashbacks to explain Nancy’s condition, mixed with Dr. Chaney pondering ways to help her. I would have been more interested sooner if this had all played out in linear fashion, but with this approach we do have our first eyeless victim within the first 15 minutes.

Even once it gets rolling, I didn’t find this one to be thrilling enough to successfully hold my attention for the entire 86 minute running time, but it’s serviceable horror flick and takes the viewer right back to the glory days of the drive-ins and the grindhouses. Band didn’t profit from his distribution deal, but this seems like the kind of movie that would have gotten a good amount of play at those venues in the ‘70s.

So if you want to check out a dirty, creepy ‘70s horror movie that doesn’t get referenced very often, seek out Mansion of the Doomed.