Two Evil Eyes

Director(s) - George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) & Dario Argento (Susperia)

Starring - Adrienne Barbeau (Creepshow, The Fog), Harvey Keitel (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs)

Release Date - 1990

Genre - Horror

Tag Line - "When I wake you...you'll be dead"

Rating (out of 5):

     Two Evil Eyes is a 1990 anthology film consisting of two segments and are directed by horror masters George Romero and Dario Argento.  Each segment is based on a different Edgar Allen Poe tale.  The first segment, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," is directed by the father of the modern zombie George Romero.  The second segment, "The Black Cat," is directed by Italian Dario Argento.  Both stories have been adapted for the screen previously in 1962 by Roger Corman in his classic Tales of Terror.
     The first segment, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," is another great piece of cinema provided by Romero.  The film revolves around a greedy woman and a doctor who plan on stealing money from her dying husband.  The two are able to drug and hypnotize the dying man and convince his lawyer to leave everything to his widow before he actually dies.  However, the man dies before they are able to carry out their devious plan.  They then stuff Mr. Valdemar in a deep freeze until they are able to collect all his money.  Things go from bad to worse when paranoia creeps in on Mrs. Valdemar.  She starts to hear strange sounds coming from the basement where her dead husband's body is being contained in a deep freeze.  One night Mrs. Valdemar goes into the basement to check on the corpse of her deceased husband and is greeted by his voice.  She screams for the doctor who immediately checks his pulse which is non existent.  Mr. Valdemar informs them that, due to him dying while he was hypnotized, the dead can use his body to access the land of the living if they do not wake him from his trance leaving the dead to attack the living.  Before the doctor has a chance to to snap Mr. Valdemar from his hypnotic trance Mrs. Valdemar shoots him in the head.  The voices immediately stop and the two go back to carrying out their morbid plan.  The two decided to bury him in the back yard in the garden.  While the good doctor is digging the shallow grave Mrs. Valdemar stays in her late husband's mansion.  Paranoid and curious she ventures downstairs to check on his corpse in the freezer where she finds that it has been opened and his body removed.  She then finds her late husband walking up the basement stairs.  The walking corpsicle tells her that the spirits now have control of his body.  She repeatedly shoots him which draws the attention of the doctor.  Before he can reach Mrs. Valdemar she is strangled to death.  The doctor then panic and snaps him out of the trance and his body collapses.  The doctor, alone and now the only beneficiary to Mr. Valdemar's fortune, goes back to his apartment with the money.  The segment then speeds up two weeks and the land lord is waiting outside on the police.  Upon entering the apartment they find the corpse of the doctor wondering about screaming in pain and saying he needs to be wakened from his trance.
     The second segment, The Black Cat, is the better story of the two.  The story follows a Pittsburgh photographer who photos murder scenes for the police.  He lives with his long time girlfriend who just recently brought home a stray black cat.  From the beginning the photographer does not like the feline and behind his girlfriend's back would torture it.  One day while having lunch he spots his girlfriend out with another man and becomes enraged.  He then goes home and begins taking pictures strangling the cat.  He takes those pictures, along with the pictures from his police scene footage, and has them published.  His girlfriend finds the book in the window of a bookstore.  After seeing the book she becomes scared and and attempts to flee to New York.  However, the photographer finds her sneaking out and kills her.  While this is going on he finds the mirror image of the cat her murdered at a bar and brings it home to her before he murders her.  He puts her and the new cat's corpse in the wall and plasters over it.  A few days later he hears something pawing at the wall where he had placed the two.  A black cat then claws its way through the wall where he kills it with a hacksaw and then fixes the spot.  Later, after being called by nosy neighbors, the police come to investigate his girlfriend's disappearance.  After checking the home twice they find nothing.  However, before leaving they hear a cat pawing behind the wall.  Once the police start investigating they see the plaster is still wet and start pulling the wall down.  Inside they find the remains of his girlfriend and cat.  The photographer is handcuffed and then murders the police officers.
    When this movie was released it had a lot riding on it.  Two of the biggest names in horror making an anthology based on Poe's work had a lot of horror and Poe fans waiting impatiently for it to be released.  However, the film was only limited released on VHS and now the DVD is out of print.  The story for each segment was good but both were kind of lacking.  The stories seemed to drag out between the action scenes.  Romero's segment in particular had long sections where there was no dialogue or action.  The story is, for Romero, quiet different than his normal films.  Everyone familiar with Romero's previous films know his signature zombies and the storyline associated with them.  The zombies in this one can actually reason and talk.  His previous zombie films have the undead as brainless creatures hellbent on consuming human flesh, however, in this one the undead are merely vessels under the control of spirits who can use their bodies as a type of vessel to attack humans.  For a zombie film the story is very different but it does work.  The storyline for The Black Cat has been filmed before this adaptation and was also an episode of the Masters of Horror series with that particular episode directed by Stuart Gordon.  This adaptation is honestly not really different that the others but it does have the effects of Tom Savini and a great cast to pull it off.  I highly recommend this one to any movie lover.