The Mansion of Madness – 1973

Ok, let me share what I read about The Mansion of Madness prior to seeing it. “A mysterious man is sent deep into the forest to investigate the bizarre behavior of the notorious Dr. Tarr. What he stumbles upon is the doctor’s torture dungeon, a hellish asylum completely cut off from civilization and presided over by the ultimate madman. Innocent people have been savagely chained, tortured, and stuck in glass cages, then forced to take part in gruesome games of ritual slaughter.”

Insanity

To me, that suggests some real horrifying scenery. I was expecting real pain, blood, and possible guts. At the very least some real insanity among the inmates and administration alike. And…that’s exactly what you get – kind of. I mean, I expected it to be with a twisted nerve and, for lack of better words, scary. Now, movies are seldom scary to me these days. I’m way too old and hardened by all movie violence I’ve seen over the years. It needs to be something really extraordinary to conjure that kind of feelings from me. I usually don’t really feel anything when watching movies, at least not unconfort. The most common feeling is perhaps that of objectivity. Or, at least false objectivity, since I believe that nothing in a review is really objective. There’s always some tint of subjective experience involved.

At the very least I had expected a spectacular experience a la The Holy Mountain or El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I feel I was robbed of that experience. To be fair, there certainly are weird scenes in The Mansion of Madness. It lives up to its name. But it’s not over-the-top enough for me. I wanted more. It feels like it’s just for show. There’s no real madness going on, it’s just an act for the cameras, a spectacle.

Horror?

The Mansion of Madness is listed as Horror at IMdB but I’m not entirely sure that it should be categorized at all. It’s more of an experience than a genre really. Or, at least it should be. I think we should be taken away by the odd characters, the strange settings, and the bright colors, but we’re not. Or, at least I’m not. The acting seems good enough but it didn’t get under my skin as I wanted to. There should have been more gruesome scenes and less talking. Maybe it’s supposed to bring out some kind of philosophic thoughts in the audience, I don’t know. To me, it stays a pretty good-looking film that fails to bring out much emotion from me. It’s neither entertaining nor interesting but there’s undoubtedly something there. Maybe it’s just an exercise in competent movie creation.

I’m disappointed!