Main cast: Adrienne Barbeau (Jessica Valdemar), Ramy Zada (Dr Robert Hoffman), Bingo O’Malley (Ernest Valdemar), Jeff Howell (The Policeman), Harvey Keitel (Rod Usher), Madeleine Potter (Annabel), John Amos (Detective LeGrand), Sally Kirkland (Eleonora), Kim Hunter (Mrs Pym), Holter Graham (Christian), EG Marshall (Steven Pike), and Martin Balsam (Mr Pym)
Directors: George Romero and Dario Argento
You ever have a dinner party where two people you really admire show up, get drunk, and tell ghost stories they barely remember?
That’s Two Evil Eyes, the 1990 horror anthology where George A Romero and Dario Argento adapt Edgar Allan Poe stories, or more accurately, mug Poe in a back alley and dress his corpse up in bad late-80s aesthetics.
The setup’s simple: two segments, one by each director.
George A Romero tackles The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, turning Edgar Allen Poe’s sinister little tale about hypnotizing a dying man into a tacky Pittsburgh soap opera. Adrienne Barbeau plays a gold-digging trophy wife so obvious she might as well be named Mrs Shifty McGreedpants, who conspires with her lover and doctor to hypnotize her rich, terminally ill husband into signing over his estate. Naturally, he dies mid-hypnosis and refuses to stay politely dead.
There’s a morgue, a haunting, and some fairly gnarly corpse makeup courtesy of Tom Savini — because if you’re making horror in 1990 Pennsylvania and don’t hire Tom Savini, you’re legally required to turn in your horror director badge.
Mr Romero, bless him, treats the whole thing like an overlong Tales from the Crypt episode, with pacing so languid you could age whiskey by it. There’s one good bit with a decomposing corpse and some well-timed gore, but it’s a lot of lifeless melodrama that feels like a weirdly bad fit for Mr Romero, whose social satire usually gives his horror bite. Here, it’s toothless.
Then comes Dario Argento’s The Black Cat, and oh boy — you can almost hear the late Mr Poe’s bones rattling in protest.
Mr Argento takes the original story about guilt, paranoia, and feline murder, throws it in a blender with bits of The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and Murders in the Rue Morgue, and douses the whole thing in lurid neon lighting and overwrought Italian sleaze.
Harvey Keitel, at peak feral-dog-in-human-form energy, stars as a crime scene photographer who’s a raging alcoholic, an abuser, and an all-around scumbag who still somehow manages to radiate brutish, greasy sex appeal because he’s Harvey Goddamn Keitel. His character kills his girlfriend’s cat (because of course he does), starts losing his grip on reality, murders his girlfriend, and makes a classic horror movie dumbass move at the end so gloriously stupid you can practically see Mr Argento cackling behind the camera.
It’s a wildly mismatched marriage of material and filmmaker. Mr Argento can’t help but shoehorn his signature visual flourishes, elaborate deaths, and inexplicable dream sequences into a story that really called for creeping dread, not exploding heads. It’s a mess, but it’s an entertaining mess.
The whole film suffers from this problem: Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic dread and quiet horror don’t vibe with George A Romero’s TV-movie approach or Dario Argento’s hallucinogenic carnage. Neither director seems interested in honoring the mood of the source material; instead, they slap their aesthetics on it like badly fitting wigs. Mr Romero makes Poe boring, and Mr Argento makes Poe horny and deranged. Only one of those is fun.
Two Evil Eyes is less a meeting of horror legends and more a cautionary tale about what happens when big names phone it in. It’s worth a watch if you’re a horror completist or want to see what happens when Edgar Allen Poe adaptations go entirely off the rails. Otherwise, crack open a copy of Mr Poe’s collected works and imagine a better movie in your head. It won’t be hard.
