Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon (aka The Mansion of Madness) (1973)

This movie, which is based loosely on a Poe short story, follows a journalist, his friend, and the man’s cousin (I think it was his cousin) thru a hellish experience at a mental hospital.  The journalist is there to do a story on the asylum’s doctor and his experimental treatments for the mentally ill.  What he doesn’t know is that before their arrival the inmates overthrew the staff and are know running the place.  Though this becomes obvious pretty quickly and soon the three are fighting for their lives.

God where do I start with a movie like this?  Well first of all it is just terrible.  It is obvious right from the start that the movie is going to make no sense at all.  The opening is bizarre and uses some sort of visual effect that looks dumb.  I wish I had a better way to explain it, but that is the best description that I can think of.  The characters are all bizarre and I had in my notes that the dubbing was pretty bad.  Only after doing some research I found out that the movie isn’t dubbed!  I find this just bizarre given the choices for some of the voices, but not bizarre in an interesting way.  Nothing about this movie is interesting.  If fact I would imagine watching paint dry would be more interesting and probably more entertaining.  This movie is so boring that I actually had to watch part of it while standing up so as not to fall asleep!  God knows I didn’t want to have to watch it again to figure out what I had missed.  The performances are live up to or actually in this case down to the material. 

The technical bits of the movie are as bad as the script and performances.  There are scenes that are terribly light and so dark that you can’t see what is going on.  I suppose this could be the copy of the movie that I watched, but I doubt it.  The camera work tries really hard to be creative with oddly framed shots and some movement thru the scenes.  But when you are trying to be interesting and you aren’t very good at it.  Well let’s just say that is a recipe for disaster. 

I really have no desire to spend any more time on this movie.  If you are interested in suffering thru this nonsense it is available very inexpensively on the budget DVD collections from Mill Creek Entertainment.  They offer some pretty good stuff, it just so happens this isn’t one of them.  For more information check them out at http://www.millcreekent.com/

0 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2008 John Shatzer