Being Film #1 for Hooptober 2024
Despite having worked together on Dawn Of The Dead, it still feels a little odd putting George A. Romero and Dario Argento together on a film. Those are two styles and aesthetics that just don’t taste right bumped up against each other. That would imply Two Evil Eyes, their mini anthology (does it even count as an anthology if there are only two stories?) doesn’t work. Each filmmaker brings their unique vision to these adaptations or inspirations of Poe, and if it’s not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, it has its moments of gore and fun.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Two horror masters serve up short horror adapted from or inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Romero returns to his EC Comics/Creepshow roots with his adaptation of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and – unsurprisingly – Argento loosely takes a bunch of images and ideas from all over Poe’s works to craft a hilariously over the top tale of murder and just desserts that ostensibly is colored after The Black Cat. That doesn’t stop Argento from having a pendulum slice a woman in two, another one boarded up behind a wall, and…Harvey Keitel as a crime photographer named Rod Usher?
I’ve seen a lot of folks bash the Romero adaptation, saying it didn’t feel indicative of his work overall. Have they seen Creepshow? Because this short, starring Adrienne Barbeau as a trophy wife who gets embroiled in a scheme with her lover to get her rich husband’s money using hypnosis is straight out of that pulpy vein. It doesn’t have the visual comic style that film did, but the sense of a monkey’s paw/twist in the wires of the plan is plainly evident, and feels inspired in places, like when both Barbeau and her slimy doctor lover played by Ray Zada can both hear Valdemar’s voice even though he’s basically a corpse in the freezer. Performance-wise Barbeau is her usual great self, and Zada is particularly skeevy as her lover, who bullies one minute and finds weird flashes of humanity in the next. The hypnosis trick is a fresh take, and I loved how they used it both to describe what happened to Valdemar to cause the horror and in how a throw-away idea about self-hypnosis leads to the doctor’s demise. That moment also includes my favorite moment in Two Evil Eyes, where the now unleashed spirits find the doctor in his high-rise apartment, and flash and flicker on the screen as formless, almost alien bodies that get closer and closer. Brilliant moment.
Also bonus points for having Tom Atkins basically be Tom Atkins in the final moments.
The Argento segment? Well, it’s pretty well-aligned to his tastes: the opening moments have a crime photographer at a crime scene where a naked woman has been graphically sliced in half with a massive pendulum. No expense is spared is showing just how bifurcated (and naked) the woman is, and it’s only made more ridiculous by the presence of John Amos as the chuckling police detective on the scene. Keitel goes full Keitel, whether he’s strangling a cat with a telephone cord or hacking his girlfriend (NOT his wife, as he makes clear a number of times) up with a cleaver. You get an obligatory dream sequence where Keitel is put to death for his crime in a medieval village by being strung up in the air and having a wooden stake shoved up through his body in graphic fashion, you get Sally Kirkland and Martin Balsam in brief cameos, a young Julie Benz for the briefest of moments, and a gleeful Tom Savini as a captured killer who revels in removing all the teeth of his victims.
Besides that you get a nonsensical but gorgeously fantastic scene involving what I am guessing are zombified kittens surviving on the entrails of a dead woman sealed up in a wall, and a hilarious Keitel death scene that maybe could have used another pass at the editing table since that is one abrupt ending.
And with that, my 11th round of Hooptober has officially begun.
Cinema Dual 
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