The Mansion of Madness (1976)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Just perfect...

It is a performances centric movie

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Spanish movie based on an Edgar Allen Poe short story. It takes place in the 1700s. A reporter goes to visit a remote sanitarium. After he meets the head of the place and seen the patients he comes to realize that the inmates are running the place and have locked up the rest of the staff.It tries to mix surrealism with comedy and horror. The result is a not uninteresting but confused and unfocused movie. The main problem is that most of the actors overact to such an embarrassing degree they're hard to take seriously. True they're supposed to be mad but do they have to be so LOUD? Also it's not scary for one second. One the other hand it's certainly never dull and the surrealistic touches do work. So it's interesting but ultimately unsuccessful.

I read reviews on this movie and decided to give it a shot. I'm an open minded guy after all and I’ve given good reviews to some pretty bad flicks. As the end credits rolled on this one I searched for meaning and something nice to say. Here goes: "This film was mercifully short." That's all I got.Okay, Okay. The sets and visuals were well done and the music helped lend to the mood of asylum life but the film was painful to watch and the endless dialogue took away from the good bits. I did find myself laughing at this film but the way you laugh at your best friend who just embarrassed himself in front of a large crowd.By the time of the "chicken dance" at the finale I had just decided to tuck and roll with the film and let the bodies fall where they fall. I don't know what could have salvaged this film. The acting was not bad and it looked like it had a budget but there just wasn't any way to make it watchable; not even the presence of beautiful bare breasts. Maybe I should have sparked a doobie or drank a LOT of beer to get the full experience of the film. Either way, I'm not watching this film again unless I'm really depressed. Then I can tell myself “At least I wasn’t in ‘Dr. Tarr's Torture Dungeon.’ I’m better than those guys."

"The Mansion of Madness" is a flawed but fun asylum horror film.**SPOILERS**In early 19th century France, Julien Couvier (Martin LaSalle) goes to see what he can learn from Dr Maillard, (Claudio Brook) renowned for his pioneering work with the insane. After being taken to see the doctor, they embark on a tour of the asylum complex as Maillard expounds on his methods, and is introduced to Maillard's daughter, Eugenie, (Ellen Sherman) who is told that she is afflicted by an increasingly erratic mania. Meeting with her in secret, he learns the truth, that Maillard is in fact the notorious bandit Raul Fragonard who came to see the real doctor seeking help then usurped his authority, assumed his identity and imprisoned him with some of his former charges. Trapped inside with the insane ruler, they race to overtake the asylum and restore the proper order within.The News: This wasn't all that bad, but it wasn't that good either. This is attributed to it being too mannered, striving for weird and shock effect in the same manner, only both cancel each other out and leave the film with nothing much about it. The fact that there's so many different ideas at play, from the different dementia's of the inmates to the ceremonies performed, seems to be commenting on society's mad blind spots and rigid systems, but although it sometimes tries to tie these ideas together, mostly it's combination of things simply detract from what is thrown in, and oftentimes that doesn't amount to much. It feels more like a series of strange scenes, odd moments and surrealist visions of mad people doing weird things. The free-flowing narrative barely functions on anything resembling a rational level, despite the traditional Gothic source material. The film wanders from one surrealist setting to another with only the barest of connective tissue. The first half of this movie is incoherent. It takes quite a while before any kind of grasp can be made on a concrete narrative thread. This chunk of the film finds the hero on a tour of the sanitarium through the different rooms of the asylum. There await such characters as the Chicken Man and a weird high priestess. While this is effectively weird, none of this is terrifying, and it makes this part of the film hard to take in. It seemed to drag in some parts. Sure there were some crazy happenings but to much talking and not enough derangement. After it has been established that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, what function does a sequence with guy pretending to have sex with a sheep carcass really serve other than helping pad out the film? Even with a meandering story and a certain lack of forward momentum, the film does have so many striking images that it exerts an odd effect, almost like being mesmerized. It is able to establish a dreamlike feel that slowly seeps into the viewer and pulls you along. Most of this is taken up in the film's big sequence, where the ones in control hold an elaborate and quite impressive ritual to be held, only for the original prisoners to be set free and lead a revolt, which is a full-on action scene with tons to enjoy about it, from the action to the choreography to much more that is quite well handled and manages to be the film's highlight. The landscape here is impressive, leading to some really effective mood scene arising from the locales, with the scenery surprisingly giving away some of it's best scenes, including a couple of really twisted chase scenes and being, in general, quite fun overall. Several of the inmates are quite memorable, and there is a sense of them being actually disturbed, which is quite rare in these kinds of films. Normally, they seem crazy but are later revealed to genuinely be sympathetic and here it's revealed that they are crazy and insane, and that works much better. Otherwise, this one wasn't all that great, but it was halfway decent.The Final Verdict: It's not the most exciting movie but if you can accept its quirks you'll find a thoughtful exercise in style. While there's other movies out there that can expose an interested viewer to these kinds of movies, this one is best left to completists only, as they will be the ones who find this flawed film enjoyable enough for repeat viewings.Rated R: Nudity, Violence, a mild rape and some Language

Absolutely dreadful Mexican film supposedly based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe about a newsman wanting to go into the confines of an asylum hidden in the woods to write a story about how it works, etc... When our hero, Gaston, is given the grand show by Dr. Maillard, head of the asylum, we see all kinds of things which are suppose to be horrific, such as men hanging around long in a dungeon, and comedic, such as our hero being joked upon by soldiers as he climbs down a ladder hanging over the side of a building. Then there is one sight which might have been meant to be both: a human man dressed as a chicken, yes, that's right a chicken, that pecks around the ground for chicken feed. The scene was to be a comedic highlight of the film, but, at least for me, it was the film's low point and really most revolting when you considered that grown men and women thought this might even be remotely entertaining. Ah! That is indeed the real horror that is Dr. Tarr and his Legion of Name Changes. And that brings me to this salient fact about the film which is most films that undergo multiple title changes usually have some kind of serious problem. Yes, this is obvious, but some have distribution problems and others, of which this is one, have numerous title changes so that someone might unsuspectingly buy the same garbage more than once. This is definitely garbage. It has very little going for it. The only performer worth having a look at is Claudio Brook as the head of the asylum. He is one huge slab of ham as he laughs maniacally, bellows orders, sashays with sword in hand, and praises the chicken. I got so tired of hearing him talk about the "soothing system" as his means to cure the mentally sick. What a bunch of ludicrosity(Hey, a film like this with a script like this deserves this kind of word). It won't take you long to figure out what is going on in the asylum nor will it be any more interesting. Cinematic chicken scratch!