Two Evil Eyes

George A. Romero (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) and Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA) each try their hand at a tale by Edgar Allan Poe in this feature comprising two hour-long segments. In Romero's THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF MR. VALDEMAR, Adrienne Barbeau is Jessica Valdemar, a former stewardess who marries an old man for his money. Through hypnosis, her ex-lover Robert tries to get Valdemar to sign his money over to Jessica, but when Valdemar dies in the process, caught between the dead and the living, Robert and Jessica find themselves in a situation from which they cannot escape. Argento transposes THE BLACK CAT to the present, with Harvey Keitel as Rod Usher, a crime scene photographer whose flighty girlfriend, Annabel, has a cat he despises. Usher kills the cat, telling Annabel that it's gone missing. Through a chain of events that reveals itself to be nothing less than destiny, Rod's life turns to a violent shambles.
Romero, once again using an animated corpse as a plot device, directs his wordy tale with a restrained hand. Argento's unmistakable style comes through in the gruesome THE BLACK CAT, making this minor effort for these two major directors an interesting curiosity not to be missed by fans of the genre.