Film Review: Two Evil Eyes

Two Evil Eyes is a film I have been meaning to watch for some time now. A collaboration between horror legends George A. Romero and Dario Argento, who both take a short story from Edgar Allen Poe as their inspiration (The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Valdemar and The Black Cat respectively), the overall film really is a game of two halves. Let's take a look at them both separately...

The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Valdemar


Now, I'm a huge fan of Romero, and totally expected this to be the superior part of the film, but what I got was 52 minutes of melodrama, with some admittedly impressive scenes chucked in.

Mr. Valdemar has seen better days...

A wife (Adrienne Barbeau) colludes with a doctor (who she is also having an affair with, and played by Ramy Zada) to hypnotise her deathbed bound husband (Bingo O' Malley) into signing over all his money to her. Things become unstuck though when the husband dies whilst still in a trance, and becomes stuck between this world and the next, haunting the wife and doctor whilst his body lies in a freezer in the basement...

Half of that synposis even sounds like a daytime soap opera, and it does come across like that times, despite the best efforts of Barbeau, who is great in the lead, and a couple of nicely shot scenes by Romero. It does also have Tom Atkins crop up near the end, unsurprisingly playing a cop, for a nice and gory conclusion to the story. Not Romero's greatest work, not his worst either.

The Black Cat


When it comes to Dario Argento, I am a bit of a novice. Several years ago I tried to watch some of his work, and I'm not going to lie to you, dear reader, but I didn't have a clue what was going on. Now several years later, I loved his part of Two Evil Eyes, and fully intend to go back through his work again, now I have a greater appreciation of all things horror.

"Give us a smile love!"

In The Black Cat, a forensic photographer (Harvey Keitel) starts to get a resentful and angry when his girlfriend brings a stray cat home. Multiple (unexplained) attempts to do the cat in follow, and the photographer grows more and more deranged, as the cat always crops back up again...

Some of The Black Cat doesn't really make that much sense on film, such as why Keitels character is that annoyed by the cats presence, or how the passage of time manages to pass THAT quickly (a book is seemingly published in record time), but Argento's fantastic shooting and Keitels frankly batshit crazy (or catshit in this case) performance make it all worthwhile.

The Black Cat also contains some truly memorable scenes, including a naked woman who has been cut in half with a pendulum slicer (we get that mere seconds in), another whose teeth have all been removed whilst their mouth has been held open by metallic grips and a truly grisly 'behind the wall' discovery. Great stuff.

The Facts In The Case Of Mr. Valdemar - **
The Black Cat - ***1/2


Overall - ***


A below-par first story made up for with a crazy second, even with it's plot holes. Underrated stuff overall.

Death Of The Dead?

Out of all the different types of Horror movie that there are, zombie films have always been my favourite. Films like the groundbreaking '...of the Dead' films by George A. Romero showed that it didn't have to be all flesh munching carnage, a political or social commentary could be covered too, without compromising any zombie action.

And we all could have a laugh too, thanks to films like Return Of The Living Dead, and later films like Shaun Of The Dead and Zombieland (although I do contest that these aren't strictly zombie films, more comedies - and very good comedies at that - that happen to have zombies in them.)

But recently, nothing has inspired me. Romero's most recent picture, Survival Of The Dead was decidedly average to put it mildly, and before that Diary Of The Dead took several viewings for me to enjoy. And if the master of the sub-genre can't get it right, shouldn't everyone else take a step back?

The main reason I'm writing this piece is because of The Walking Dead. The first season started well enough, a solid story and some great zombie carnage, but things started to crumble near the end. But this second season for me has been so melodramatic and slow, I'm one episode away from throwing in the towel. It's akin to an episode of Eastenders, but with the undead showing up to eat some faces off now and again.

I'd waited so long for a zombie TV show to appear. And when it did, all it gave us was a cast that got more unlikable by the episode (I honestly didn't mind them at first, but now I can barely even stand to look at them) and storylines like "Where did the little girl vanish to?" and "Oh no this little kid got shot". Now, I can barely tolerate the main cast, but the kids who barely got any dialogue? And it's been dragged out for 3 episodes at the start of the season? Argh! And I'm not even mentioning the fact they don't even call them zombies!

But it's stuff like that, and the fact that no really good zombie film has come along recently (with the possible exception of French film La Horde, which was fun but totally unoriginal) that makes me wonder whether people should just take a very un-zombie like breath and...well, just not make any zombie films for a while?

This will never happen, of course. Not now. Zombies are up there with Justin Bieber and whoever is popular on X Factor this year in the cultural coolness stakes. Zombies are "in". Any scumbag lad can roll into his favourite club in fancy dress as a zombie, regardless of the fact that they have passed their creative high point.

Just one look on Google images for 'zombie', shows bunches of utter morons doing zombie flashmobs (possibly the worst thing to happen to civilization since World War II), artwork of people being zombies, or stills from 'ironic' zombie films and not a sign of any of the undead from Romero's films (nor anyone elses for that matter.)

And The Walking Dead, for all it's soap opera moments, and occasional zombies, is currently insanely popular, with a third season awarded, and other TV networks scrambling for ideas (such as a mooted Zombieland TV show at Fox, which will be shitcanned when the fad has passed) to jump on the bandwagon.

All we can do is just cling onto the fact that audiences are fickle. Today it's zombies, tomorrow it will be a different creature feature altogether. Maybe vampires!

No wait, the Twilight books have already ruined them, never mind.