By Orrin Grey
The Mansion of Madness (1973). Director: Juan Lopez Moctezuma. Cast: Claudio Brooke, Arthur Hansel, Ellen Sherman. Country: Mexico.
I have to admit that I didn’t quite finish this one. I got most of the way through, though it took something like three sittings, but life proved just too damned short to suffer through the last few minutes.
The Mansion of Madness uses Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” as its jumping-off point to tell a “story” (by the loosest of definitions) about a journalist (Arthur Hansel) who comes to a spacious mental institute to study the “soothing system” of Dr. Maillard, only to (eventually) discover that the inmates are running the asylum and that Dr. Maillard is actually an insane thief named Fragonard (Claudio Brooke). I guess that’s technically a spoiler, since it takes our protagonist the majority of the film’s running time to figure it out, but it’s pretty clear to the viewer within the first few minutes, even if you haven’t read the story.
You know you’re off to a weird start when the movie’s credits are in what I dubbed “Predator-vision”, a sort of lenticular, red-and-gray haze over shots from later in the movie. From there, it descends quickly into an increasingly-bizarre series of Terry Gilliam-esque set-pieces as our protagonist is guided through the asylum, where the lunatics are given more-or-less free reign to do as they please and so, spend their time enacting weird, miniature dramas, beating one another with sticks, and pelting our protagonist with chickens. We are shown people who live inside the chimneys of furnaces and from whose heat Fragonard claims they refine a drug that cures listlessness and aggression. We see the inmates building an “Electrosphinx”. We see a man named ‘Mr. Chicken’, whose shtick is fairly self-explanatory. An old man crucified in Fragonard’s Dante-esque dungeon delivers prophecies that the movie doesn’t feel compelled to subtitle. A naked woman rides a horse through a room where people lie in glass cases.
The plot, such as it is, consists of our protagonist finally figuring out that he’s maybe not in the best place in the world and then trying to rescue the daughter of the actual Dr. Maillard, who has been keeping herself “safe” by pretending to be mad. There’s also another plot involving the people who escorted our protagonist to the asylum, who are immediately captured by the madmen. The girl is instantly raped (of course) and then pretty much abandoned by the plot entirely.
The Mansion of Madness is also known by the title ‘Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon‘, and while there’s not actually a lot of torture, I’d say that it’s still not exactly for the squeamish, either. There’s the aforementioned rape scene early on and loads of incidental nudity, but mostly, the problem is that everything just seems sort of grotesque for the sake of being grotesque, without any rhyme or reason. Most of the events of the film seem to be thinly-veiled excuses for yet another bizarre set-piece or a sequence of unpleasant slapstick, punctuated by some of the weirdest and most inappropriate music ever recorded. Which, I suppose, fits with the theme of the story, if it can be said to have one, but which doesn’t make for a very enjoyable movie, or a very coherent one. To say the least.
You can purchase The Mansion of Madness through Amazon.com.