Bringing George A. Romero and Dario Argento together for the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired omnibus film Two Evil Eyes should have resulted in every horror maven’s dream project. Yet common wisdom holds that there’s a lopsided imbalance between the film’s two segments, with Romero’s staid classicism completely outshined by Argento’s baroque aestheticism. While there’s a certain measure of truth to these assertions, both halves of the film decidedly incorporate their makers’ overarching themes and preoccupations. With adjusted expectations, Two Evil Eyes can best be seen as a capstone tag-team effort from two filmmakers who found themselves at something of a crossroads in their careers in the late 1980s, what with increasing numbers of horror titles being shunted over to direct-to-video release.
Romero’s “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” reunites five cast members from his earlier Creepshow, so it’s hardly a surprise that the segment feels like it could’ve been trimmed and tacked on to that anthology film, a notion that its unsubtle EC Comics-inflected moral lesson does little to dispel. In fact, a trim might have done it good, since its primary faults lay in the longueurs of its windup. The storyline takes the Poe tale’s preoccupation with hypnosis and the attendant link between death and sleep and sets it firmly within a framework of greed, betrayal, and revenge from beyond the grave. It’s even got zombies of a sort.
Jessica (Adrienne Barbeau) is a trophy wife who conspires with Dr. Robert Hoffman (Ramy Zada) to keep her mortally sick husband, Ernest Valdemar (Bingo O’Malley), in a state of hypnotic suspension and do their bidding. When he dies inopportunely, before their plans can be finalized, they decide put him in cold storage in the basement freezer. What they haven’t bargained for, however, is that Valdemar is still under hypnosis. Once we get to this point, Romero’s instincts for clever, elegant blocking and camera placement really kick in: The shot where Jessica saunters into frame and shoots her ice-cold husband in the head is effectively staged for a jolt of surprise, as is a later reveal of the shambling undead reflected in a mirror.
Conceptually, Romero makes a fascinating isomorphic link between the obelisk-shaped metronome that Hoffman uses to keep Valdemar under control and the eye-in-the-pyramid symbol found on the dollar bill. Money, as in most of Romero’s films, is the root of all evil. This is evident in everything from the depiction of routinized consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, to the sell-out mentality that betrays codes of chivalry in Knightriders, to the one-percenters living in hermetic safety in Fiddler’s Green in Land of the Dead. So Romero chooses to cap his segment with the obvious, yet still potent, image of money splattered with blood.
Argento’s “The Black Cat” creates a dense textural web that encompasses a number of references to Poe’s other works. In fact, the segment opens with footage of Poe’s Baltimore residence and gravesite that Argento shot while visiting the city, hoping to make a documentary about his idol. The story’s antihero, self-destructive crime-scene photographer Rod Usher (Harvey Keitel), is named after the main character in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” while his wife Annabelle (Madeleine Potter) borrows her name from the poem “Annabelle Lee.” The first murder scene Usher visits is patterned after “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and another references the lesser-known tale of “Berenice.” A nosy neighbor is called Pym in a nod to the titular protagonist of Poe’s sole novel.
In an especially subtle bit of stagecraft, Argento places a portrait of the decadent poet Charles Baudelaire on the wall of the Usher home that can only be glimpsed in medium and long shots. Baudelaire was famously Poe’s first European critic and translator, as well as the “gateway” for most subsequent devotees on the Continent. In this way, Argento traces his own aesthetic lineage back to Poe, the man he has referred to as his “spiritual father.”
“The Black Cat” is full-bore Argento, with the maestro moving the camera in ways only an unmitigated madman of cinema would even conceive: He fixes it to the vertiginously swinging blade of the pendulum, swoops and scuttles around the Usher house in a cat’s-eye view, and gazes up a bathtub drain as a deluge of bloody water engulfs the lens. But some of the most impressive camerawork done by DP Giuseppe Maccari takes place around a massive three-story spiral staircase, with the camera trailing Usher up and down all three flights, not to mention plummeting down the center of the stairway in two jaw-dropping shots.
Nor is this vintage Argento only owing to the pyrotechnic style. His often-touched-upon themes of madness, monomaniacal obsession, and murderous rage find themselves embodied here in characters that possess a bit more dynamic range than in some of his earlier films. Partly, of course, this stems from putting a talent as volcanic as Keitel’s at the service of Argento’s vision, and yet both are ably assisted just as much by Potter’s ethereal, vulnerable, but not helpless delineation of Annabelle. Although Argento’s segment threatens to run away with the film, there are sufficient pleasures of the aesthetic and intellectual variety to recommend Two Evil Eyes as a qualified, if not exactly unified, success.
Image/Sound
This 4K presentation represents a considerable bump-up from Blue Underground’s already quite impressive 2019 Blu-ray in the areas of image density and delineation. All those earthen browns and icy blues pop with even more gusto, and darker scenes reveal more nuance. On the audio front, the original 2.0 track is carried over from the earlier Blu-ray, while the 7.1 track is replaced here by a Dolby Atmos one, which really spreads around the more impactful sound effects, like slamming doors and gunshots. Pino Donaggio’s ravishing score, combining electronic and orchestral effects in surprising ways, sounds better than ever.
Extras
Blue Underground ports over all the bonus materials from their stacked 2019 Blu-ray edition, with the exception of the soundtrack CD included in that release. Troy Howarth, author of Murder by Design: The Unsane Cinema of Dario Argento, delivers an information-packed commentary track in his usual easy-going style. He dives deep into the early team-up of Argento and Romero on Dawn of the Dead, the conception and gestation of Two Evil Eyes, the state of the directors’ careers in the late ’80s, as well as the courses they subsequently took. Howarth also points out the filmmakers’ divergent attitudes toward Poe’s stories: Argento, a widely read aficionado of macabre literature, considers Poe his idol and master, while Romero, of course, was far more influenced by the ironic twist endings of the EC Comics of the ’50s.
A wide-ranging selection of featurettes include Two Masters’ Eyes, which includes Romero and Argento discussing the production and contributions from makeup guru Tom Savini and executive producer Claudio Argento. Aside from some tantalizing behind-the-scenes footage, probably the most interesting thing here is the information that the directors originally had two totally different Poe stories in mind. Romero wanted to do “The Masque of the Red Death” as a modern AIDS allegory, and Argento had his eye on “The Pit and the Pendulum” (which did make its way into his segment, after a fashion) set in a South American dictatorship.
Also of note are the featurettes devoted to Savini’s special effects wizardry and his tour of his personal home, as well as a long and fascinating interview with assistant director Luigi Cozzi that has Argento’s Profondo Rosso store as a backdrop. Rounding out the supplements are interviews with actors Adrienne Barbeau, Ramy Zada, and Madeleine Potter, composer Pino Donaggio, cowriter Franco Ferrini, and costumer designer Barbara Anderson.
Overall
Romero and Argento’s Two Evil Eyes receives its most impressive transfer to date from Blue Underground, even if there are no new extras to be found in this package.
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