Mansion of the Doomed, Eyes of Strangers

Actually, not all of the eyes are of strangers. Lance Henriksen isn't a stranger to the nubile Nancy (Trish Stewart), but most of the eyes she ends up with are eyes of strangers.  You gotta love a mad-scientist who has a big cage off of his basement laboratory to keep his failed experiments. I don't mean to be judgmental, as many of us have utilized cages for our own embarrassing  failures...but still, in horror films, these types of mad-scientists always prove to be the most colorful. Hence 1976's "Mansion of the Doomed." Warning...though a lot of eyes will be pulled out here, you may find your self diverting your own eyes from the silver screen.

Wrought with guilt from causing an accident that results in his daughter's blindness, renown eye surgeon, Dr. Chaney (Richard Basehart) is determined to restore her sight. The newly blind Nancy is now very sad and just so happens to be engaged to her dad's rival, Dr. Dan Bryan (Henriksen). Now that Dr. Chaney has a personal stake in the subject of restoring sight to the blind, he decides to adopt Dr. Bryan's theory...transplanting new eyes into the blind. Yep, you guessed it, he drugs his daughter's fiance and removes his eyes, placing those eyes into Nancy. It seems to have worked, Nancy sees again and Dr. Bryan is delegated to the aforementioned cage where he loses his sanity and wanders about with two holes in his face...yuck!

Not knowing where the eyes came from, Nancy is happy again. Yep, you got it...the eyes stop working. Dr. Chaney believes he can perfect it and finds a hooker for the next donor. It works again...and then the eyes go bad. You got it...a pretty nurse...a sultry real estate agent...two thugs...etc. Meanwhile the cage is filling up with lunatics with holes in their faces. Also, Nancy's once beautiful face is horrifically scarred after all those eye transplants. Now the lunatics begin working together to plot escape...and Dr. Chaney begins looking at children as donors. As the drooling and ranting lunatics get smarter, and as Dr. Chaney gets more brazen...a gruesome ending takes shape.

Are a few (okay, maybe a dozen) lunatics in a cage an acceptable price for the advances of science? Will the once pretty and sane Nancy be pretty and sane again...and be able to see? Will the now lunatic and monstrous Dr. Bryan be able to exact revenge on the fiend that plucked out his orbs and re-capture the love he had for the now hideous Nancy? A heart warming story that is quite gory will shock you and have you wondering how you missed this tale from 1976. Directed by Michael Pataki, "Mansion of the Doomed" contains some of the most horrific images ever put on film. If you can still point your eyes at the screen by the end credits, you would have taken in a gem of a horror film.