Part of growing up watching the horror directing legends of the past was concocting what kind of cool shit you’d get if you merged their talents into one super-horror film. It may sound a bit Fantasy Football of me, but just imagine if John Carpenter directed a Wes Craven script, or Robe Hooper directed a Stuart Gordon one, or what if David Cronenberg and Clive Barker somehow collaborated on a flick that took body horror to the next level – could their styles merge, or would they utterly refuse to gel; who knows? While some of these collaborations did sort of happen (Carpenter and Hooper both delivered installments for 1993’s Body Bags and Cronenberg played the villain in Barker’s Nightbreed), in 1990, we got the closest thing we ever got to a horror supergroup in the form of Two Evil Eyes, an anthology film based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe that saw Pittsburg’s king of the zombies team up with the Italian Hitchcock in order to try to deliver a horror blowout like no other.
Romero? Argento? Poe? What could go wrong?
The first in this double act of dire dealings is Romero’s take on The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Valdemar which sees trophy wife Jessica Valdemar take extreme measures to ensure that she gets what she’s owed as her older, wealthy husband rapidly succumbs to a terminal illness. As she liquidated his assets left and right, Valdemar’s lawyer seems rightfully disturbed that his client’s wife is rapidly dismantling his empire to cement her own financial gain, but after all of his checks pass muster, he has no option but to sign everything over to Jessica.
But how has she managed to pull this off. Well, it’s simple really. She and her old beau, Dr. Robert Hoffman have concocted a plan where the doctor has been hypnotising the frail Valdemar in order to get him sign and agree to everything they ask and all they have to do is just keep him alive for two more weeks for everything to clear and they’ll be free and clear. However, when the old goat suddenly dies while under hypnosis, both Jessica and Hoffman find that his soul seems trapped between worlds and guess what? He’s not alone.
From here we zip over to Dario Argento’s very loose and very unhinged take on The Black Cat; but while the original story was fairly subtle, this version stirs things up to a bizarre degree.
Rod Usher is a crime scene photographer with a particular sadistic streak who plans to turn all of his morbid snaps into an art book but just can’t find the standout image that’ll really tie the whole thing together. Coincidently, his flighty, musician girlfriend, Annabel brings home a black cat one day that has a distinctive mark on its fur in the shape of gallows and the animosity between Rod and the hissing feline gets so bad that he gets the urge to strangle it to death while photographing the deed to finally get that image his was searching for. However, when Annabel reacts to her missing pet in a way that’s similar to a parent losing their child, Rod anger and resentment boils over, causing him to do the unthinkable. Dude, what’s wrong with just snapping shots of old people playing chess in the park…?
If I’m being brutally honest, Two Evil Eyes didn’t turn out to be the horror blowout extravaganza I hoped for, but even if this union between Romero and Argento didn’t prove to be as anywhere near as advantageous as their last (Argento produced Dawn Of The Dead while supplying prog rock group Goblin for the score), there’s still some good shit to be found scattered around. However – and it genuinely pains me to say this – but the main fault lies with Romero as his installment sees him tackle a slow burn ghost/zombie story that he approaches with all the urgency of a daytime TV movie screened on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. It’s a shame because not only is Romero the nan that gave us Creepshow, arguably the greatest horror anthology in history, but he even ropes in some of the cast from that movie, making it something of a reunion. However, even though we have Adrienne Barbeau as yet another conniving wife with giant hair, E.G. Marshall as a concerned lawyer and Tom fuckin’ Sizemore as a hardbitten cop that dislikes rich people, The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Valdemar proves to be as clunky and overly long as that unwieldy title.
Romero shoots the thing with barely any pizzazz, forgoing the energy he brought to Creepshow and Dawn Of The Dead in favour of a slower, more methodical approach that he brought to his simian psychological thriller, Monkey Shines. As a result, as the movie goes over the rather painstaking details of trying to keep the body of Valdemar hidden (the freezer was probably a bad choice), it accidently forgoes any tension and just sort of plods along. However, while things finally perk up in the finale when the hypnotized/zombie/ghost/thing that is Valdemar finally gets up for a brisk murder, it ends up being a case of too little, too late and even the image of shadowy spirit people from the other side and a splattery death by metronome can’t bring the installment back from the dead.
However, what can bring the whole movie back from the dead is a swift injection of vitamin Argento and as we plough into Dario’s gleefully sadistic shot at The Black Cat, the Italian maestro shows that he’s understood the brief far better than Romero did by not only scattering tons of Poe references all over the place – he even manages to squeeze in a super gruesome Pit and the Pendulum refence in there super early – but he manages to somehow accurately modernise the voice of the gothic author while managing to basically tell a story that’s all his own. In fact, aside from 2001’s Sleepless, The Black Cat remains the best thing the director’s made since Opera back in 1987 and it’s mostly because his famously energetic camera and his sadistic bloodlust manages to sync up perfectly with a magnificently misanthropic lead performance by a typically shouty Harvey Keitel. When he isn’t wearing the most ridiculously pretentious berret ever seen of film or drunkly ranting at his girlfriend as she frets over her missing pussy (“It’s a fucking cat! MEOW! MEOW! may genuinely be Keitel’s greatest line reading), he’s chopping her up with a cleaver, stashing her in the walls and pulling off one of the most absurd acts of cover up I’ve ever witnessed. And yet, somehow Argento managed to transfer that dream logic he perfected in the giallo genre far better here than he did in the later Trauma, another film he made on American soil.
It all ends in typical fashion that sees its lead get his just desserts in satisfyingly grotesque manner, but the fact that Argento approaches it in a way that just keep giving (Tom Savini gore, deranged pagan dream sequences, lots of Keitel bellowing), means that if you’re a glass half full sort of person, it manages to elevate Romero’s tepid effort. However, if your the negative type, you could also reason that Romero’s segment brings Two Evil Eyes’ average down and thus we discover the major disadvantage of only having two entries in you anthology movie – if one of your Two Evil Eyes is just a little bit cross-eyed, then your overall vision is going to seriously flawed.
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