TWO EVIL EYES (Argento/Romero, 1990)

Was driving home the other day and I realized that I hadn't watched or reviewed a single Romero film for this project. Odd, as he's my favorite horror director, and maybe my favorite director in general.

This is a two piece (is anthology the correct term if there's only two parts?) film with one part directed by George A. Romero and one half directed by Dario Argento. Both were taken from Poe short stories. The Romero part ("The Facts of the Case of Mr. Valdemar") was pretty much just there, more like an extended TALES FROM THE CRYPT episode than a Romero social parable. There's a cheating wife waiting to collect the fat inheritance check from her soon-to-dead-husband. Hubby gets hypnotized and when he dies, he's still under. Dude never knows he's dead or something, and soon the wife hears thumps coming from the freezer they stashed him in. Hijinks go down, and, like a TALES episode, everyone ends up dead.

Argento's half, "The Black Cat", is pretty great, though. Harvey Keitel is in it, giving a fine paranoid, manic performance as a crime scene photographer whose girlfriend finds a black cat which Keitel is convinced is about to kill him. Classic Argento psychlogical terror here, with great stylish camera movements and Keitel actually strangling a cat on camera. Later, he tries to lynch the cat with an electrical cord. Things go totally WICKER MAN for a bit, and there's also a Tom Atkins cameo. Great, forgotten film that more people should make an effort to track down.

(Bonus: my copy was an old VHS rental, with a trailer for SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER before it. Looks pretty horrible, but it does include the line from a narrator stating, "Nothing can stop a scanner. Except for perhaps another scanner." It probably doesn't read correctly, but when it's delivered in The Movie Guy Voice, it's pretty absurd. This makes me realize that I didn't include any Cronenberg in the project. Always next year, amiright?