Two Evil Eyes

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	1990
Country of origin:	Italy / USA
Director:	Dario Argento, George A. Romero
Genre:	Horror double bill
Starring:	Adrienne Barbeau, Ramy Zada, Bingo O'Malley, Harvey Keitel, Madeleine Potter, John Amos
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100827/
Tagline:	When I Wake You...You'll Be Dead
Favourite line:	"I married a rich, old man. I let him use me, for pleasure and for show. Now I'm going to let him pay me for my services."

George A. Romero and Dario Argento team up to direct an hour segment of this movie each, with both shorts based on an Edgar Allen poe story.
I will deal with each part individually.

Romero's segment - The Facts About Mr. Valdeman.
A young woman plots a way to get her hand on her elderly husbands fortune. She is having an affair with a much younger man, whom she plans to marry after the death of her current spouse. All is going well until the old man passes away three days before the relevant documents can be ratified, meaning that she will be left with nothing.
So what to do?
Well, obviously, empty the chest freezer in the basement and dump his body in there. Problem is, he doesn't seem to be quite dead, and keeps talking to them, even rising from his frozen tomb to torment them.....
It is an effective chiller, though the level of gore is disappointingly low. Romero is always efficient at this type of thing, and it's nice that there is a certain 'zombie' element to the tale, as the old dude starts to walk again.
Interesting, if not inspired then.

Argento's segment - The Black Cat.
In an inspired piece of casting, the redoubtable Harvey Keitel plays Roderick Usher, a photographer who specialises in 'Urban Horror'. He is oft found at crime scenes, snapping exclusive pictures of freshly butchered corpses. One day he returns home to find that his wife has taken in a stray cat, which takes an instant dislike to him, scratching him when he tries to pet it.
Harvey's not pleased.
Using the cat as a prop for one of his sets of images, he kills the cat, capturing the whole thing on film for publication - this section is very convincing, and quite disturbing, to the point that The American Humane Society have a declaration immediately after the section finishes declaring that no animals were harmed to make the movie. One thing though, the cat shows up again.
Harvey's not pleased.
He and his girlfriend have a row, and he promptly kills her, and buries her behind a hastily constructed wall, along with the feline. Then the cops start sniffing around, and things escalate beyond his control.
Harvey's decidedly not pleased.
Far superior to the Romero section, this is a masterfully creepy tale, set in familiar settings to up the horror element.
Very violent in places, and with one stand out piece of animatronic gore, this is Argento doing what he does best.

Overall, the movie is a mixed bag, and the two sections don't really hang together all that well.
The original idea, apparently, was for this to be a series of one hour episodes for a TV show inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, but when the project fell through, they simply spliced the two existing episodes together into this curio offering.
Not outstanding, certainly, but horror completists should certainly check it out at some point.