Our third trip to the Inner Sanctum was for the least fantastical story so far. Having played a suffering neurologist in Calling Dr Death (1943) and a suffering academic in Weird Woman (1944), Lon Chaney Jr, again under the direction of Reginald LeBorg, this time plays a suffering artist and is no more suited to this role than he was either of the others. Without the vaguely horrific elements of Calling Dr Death and the more overt supernatural slant bestowed on Weird Woman, Dead Man’s Eyes is just a competently made but very forgettable thriller with a mystery that’s not hard to solve and a truly ludicrous plot device to get the story going.

David Stuart (Chaney), despite visual evidence that he’s little more than mediocre, firmly believes that his latest painting is the one that will put him somewhere near the top of the art world (he’s already sufficiently famous for his subsequent predicament to make front page headlines). It’s a portrait of his adoring model Tanya Czoraki (Acquanetta, from the Paula the Ape Woman films), the latest in a growing line of women who inexplicably fall for Chaney’s whiney, dewy-eyed self-pitying that runs throughout the Inner Sanctum films. But Stuart is already engaged to fiancé Heather ‘Brat’ Hayden (Jean Parker) whose father is known to all, including Stuart, as “Dad” (Edward Fielding). Stuart likes to keep his eyes in good shape with regular applications of eyedrops which – and this is where all logic flies screaming out of the nearest window – he keeps on a bathroom shelf next to an almost identical bottle of highly corrosive acetic acid. Quite why anyone would want to keep such a dangerous subject in their bathroom is inexplicable enough, but why he would keep them in near identical containers is asking us to stretch our goodwill a long way.

Inevitably, there’s an accident when Tanya accidentally swaps the bottles around and Stuart is blinded when he applies the acid to his eyes. Now sightless and unable to complete his greatest work, Stuart spirals into the kind of self-pity and depression that Chaney was making his trademark until Dr Sam Welles (Jonathan Hale) suggests that a cornea transplant might be able to restore his sight. All he needs is a donor. Step forward the selfless “Dad” who offers his corneas when he dies if Stuart can hold on that long. The rest is easy enough to guess. Stuart breaks off his engagement to Heather, someone kills “Dad”, the police, led by Captain Drury (Thomas Gomez) suspect Stuart (who was found over the body with blood on his hands) and he has to now undergo the cornea transplant (which may not work at all) and find a way to clear his name.

Dwight V. Babcock’s script isn’t very interesting, Chaney is again out of his depth (and again has women falling at his feet – how did he do it?) and the mystery of who really killed “Dad” is pretty obvious from the outset. It’s asking an awful lot to expect audiences to find much sympathy for a character stupid enough to leave a corrosive liquid (that makes a nasty sizzling sound as it eats into Stuart’s cornea, though it seems to leave the rest of his eyes intact) next to his eye wash. If he’s that monumentally stupid, maybe he deserves everything that comes to him. LeBorg was a solid if unspectacular director of B thrillers but it’s clear that he was already growing tired of the series by now and doesn’t do much to help offset the audience’s incredulity at Stuart’s idiocy.

By now, it must have started to dawn on poor Chaney that the career revival he hoped the Inner Sanctum films would provide wasn’t going to happen. Instead of elevating him to real stardom, instead the series had rescued him from playing monsters but had instead burdened him with almost identical characters that gave him little opportunity to show any of the range that we suspect him to have been capable – his terrific turn as Lennie in Lewis Milestone’s adaption of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1939) must have seemed a long way off by now.

But he’s still classier than some of his co-stars. Most of them are there going through the motions, but Acquanetta once again proves that, strikingly beautiful though she was, she was no actress, delivering her dialogue stiffly and in a virtual monotone. Babcock’s script is wordy but still gives the cast little to work with – Chaney’s half-whispered inner monologues are much reduced this time (they’d be abandoned altogether from the next film) but while we understand that he’s upset by his predicament, he still comes across as unnecessarily cruel to everyone around him, particularly Tanya. He’s so rude and whining that he becomes a positive turn off and again we’re left to wander what it was about Chaney that inspired Inner Sanctum‘s producer Ben Pivar to keep casting him as a man irresistible to every woman he meets.

With all the tangled unrequited love, webs of intrigue and copious bickering, Dead Man’s Eyes feels more like a soap opera than it does a horror film. In truth, it’s not a horror film at all, and even as a mystery thriller it’s lacking. After two enjoyable if not exactly earth-shattering instalments, it was disappointing to see the Inner Sanctum series already starting to stumble, there was at least one more halfway decent film to come. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the next in the series, The Frozen Ghost (1945).