Two Evil Eyes
Encyclopedia
Two Evil Eyes is a 1990
1990 in film
The year 1990 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* CGI technique is expanded with motion capture for CGI characters, used in Total Recall .* The first digitally-manipulated matte painting is used, in Die Hard 2....

 double feature
Double feature
The double feature, also known as a double bill, was a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatre managers would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.The double feature, also known as...

 horror film
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 written and directed by the Italian
Italian people
The Italian people are an ethnic group that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence , and are distinguished from people...

 Dario Argento
Dario Argento
Dario Argento is an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for his work in the horror film genre, particularly in the subgenre known as giallo, and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies....

 and the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 George A. Romero
George A. Romero
George Andrew Romero is a Canadian-American film director, screenwriter and editor, best known for his gruesome and satirical horror films about a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. He is nicknamed "Godfather of all Zombies." -Life and career:...

. The two had previously worked together on the immensely popular Dawn of the Dead in 1978
1978 in film
The year 1978 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* February 1 - Bob Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara, a documentary of the "Rolling Thunder Revue" tour premieres in Los Angeles, California....

.

Overview

The film is split into two separate tales ("The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. An example of a tale of suspense and horror, it is also, to a certain degree, a hoax as it was published without claiming...

" and "The Black Cat
The Black Cat (short story)
"The Black Cat" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. It is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"...

") based largely on the works of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

.

Romero's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" stars Adrienne Barbeau
Adrienne Barbeau
Adrienne Jo Barbeau is an American actress and the author of three books. Barbeau came to prominence in the 1970s as Broadway's original Rizzo in the musical Grease, and as Carol Traynor, the divorced daughter of Maude Findlay in the sitcom Maude...

 and showcases his traditional mix of horror with social commentary, especially capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

.

Argento's "The Black Cat" stars Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel is an American actor. Some of his most notable starring roles were in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott's The Duellists and Thelma and Louise, Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Jane Campion's The...

 and blends a number of Poe references into an all new narrative. And also Merchant Ivory's The Bostonians
The Bostonians (film)
The Bostonians is a 1984 Merchant Ivory film based on Henry James's novel of the same name. The film stars Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Reeve, Madeleine Potter and Jessica Tandy. The movie received respectable reviews and showings at arthouse theaters in New York, London and other cities...

heroine and her mother (Madeleine Potter
Madeleine Potter
Madeleine Potter is an American actress who has played supporting roles in over twenty films and TV shows, including four productions directed by James Ivory. She has also appeared in numerous stage productions in the United States and United Kingdom...

 and Barbara Bryne
Barbara Bryne
Barbara Bryne is a British-born American-based stage, film and television actress. Onstage she has appeared in comedy, dramatic and musical productions...

) reunited.

Both of the tales were filmed, and take place, in contemporary Pittsburgh.

Synopsis

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"

Jessica Valdemar, an attractive middle-aged woman, rides in a taxi to the downtown Pittsburgh office of Steven Pike, her elderly husband’s lawyer with some paperwork for Mr. Pike approval. Pike sees that Jessica’s elderly husband, who is dying from an un-named terminal illness, is liquidating a number of his assets for cash and suspects Jessica of having undue influence on him. Jessica denies the allegations that she’s any negative influence over her husband, while Pike makes a phone call to the house to talk with Ernest Valdemar, who speaks over the phone in a weak but coherent voice explaining about his decision to let Jessica take control of his money and assets from his personal signature on the written documents that she has. Pike reluctantly agrees to let Jessica have access to the money, but warns her that if anything were to happen to Mr. Valdemar within the next three weeks before the transfer of his estate over to Jessica is finalized, she will be investigated by the authorities.

Jessica returns home to Ernest Valdemar’s large suburban mansion where she meets with Dr. Robert Hoffman where its revealed that he and Jessica have been conspiring to cheat the terminally ill Mr. Valdemar out of his estate by hypnotizing him and having him do what they wish from his deathbed. Jessica doesn’t like the procedure, but Robert wants it done because he used to have a romance with Jessica and wants to run off with her after they acquire his $3 million assets. The next day, Jessica goes to a bank where she withdraws $300,000 and stores it in a safe. Robert sees this. But then, Mr. Valdemar goes into cardiac arrest and dies while under another hypnosis spell. Not wanting to reveal his death just yet, Robert and Jessica carry his body to the basement where they hide it in a freezer. But during the night, Jessica becomes frightened when she hears moaning coming from the basement, but when she tries to wake up Robert, he has put himself under a hypnotic-induced slumber to help him sleep.

The next morning, Jessica and Robert wake up and also hear the same noises coming from the basement. Upon checking the body, they hear Ernest Valdemar’s voice coming from the still body claiming that his soul is alive and trapped in a dark void between the living and the dead while under hypnosis. Valdemar tells them that he sees "others" in the dark void looking at him. While Jessica goes out to make sense of this situation, she returns to find Robert talking to Mr. Valdemar’s undead corpse who tells him that the "others" are vengeful spirits trapped in a realm and want to use him to enter our world. Valdemar tells Robert to wake him up and free him from his hypnotic state. In a panic, Jessica shoots Valdemar’s corpse and wants to bury the body and skip town with the money they have. While Robert heads outside to dig a hole to bury the body, Jessica goes back into the cellar only to find Valdemar’s body rising up out of the freezer and walking towards her saying that he is under control of "the others" to use him. Jessica shoots him, but he keeps on coming. Robert enters the house when he hears the gunshots and sees Jessica and Valdemar struggling on the balcony where the undead walking cadaver shoots Jessica in the head and she falls off the balcony, dead.

Robert finally tells Valdemar that he’s going to wake him and free him from his hypnosis. But after doing so by counting to five, Valdemar tells Robert that it's too late to wake him for without his body as a conduit, the Others cannot return to their realm. "They're with you now!" exclaims Valdemar, who finally falls dead. Robert then steals all the cash that Jessica had stored in the safe and flees the house. Robert goes back to his apartment in downtown Pittsburgh, where he puts himself under a hypnotic sleep. But then, the ghostly "Others" enter his apartment and kill him by shoving the hypnotic digital counter into his chest. The ghosts then form themselves into one large mass-like mist and enter Robert's dead body.

Several days later, the police led by Detective Grogan arrive at Robert’s apartment to answer complaints about a "strange smell" and constant moaning coming from the apartment. Grogan finds the apartment ransacked and the stolen cash scattered everywhere. But just then, the horribly decomposed body of Robert, under the control of the Others, appears and attacks Grogan, telling him that there is nobody to wake him up.

"The Black Cat"

Rod Usher makes his entrance in a building decorated with the abject remains of dismantled corpses. A naked woman lies bound to a table, sliced in two by a huge pendulum-like blade. Rod is a professional crime scene photographer for as he puts it: "still life’s my art," a talent which ensures that he is frequently called upon the local authorities -led by Detective LeGrand- to document the horrors of the baroque crime scenes which are apparently commonplace in Pittsburgh where Rod lives.

After arriving home at a semi-fancy row house, Rod works in his darkroom in the basement developing the photos when his work is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious black cat, which has apparently been adopted by his live-in girlfriend Annabel. Rod and Annabel’s relationship is uncomfortably distant. Annabel is delicate, sensitive, and somewhat ethereal, while Rod is a rough, burly, brutish man who seem more at home with the gritty hyper-reality of crime scenes that he is with Annabel’s talk of witches and superstition. Annabel, in contrast to Rod, is a professional violinist who gives private lessons to local high school students who show up at the house after their school classes, and she even takes some of them on excursions to local opera houses to watch the arts of life.

Over the next several days, a strong antipathy grows between Rod and the mysterious cat, a situation worsened by Annabel’s excessive protection of it. Driven to distraction by the cat’s apparent hatred of him, Rod eventually strangles it during a photo shoot he has set up with the cat being the center of attention. Rod then uses the photos of him strangling the cat to post on the cover of his newest photography book, titled Metropolitan Horrors, a lurid collection of his most revolting pictures. As Annabel begins to guess the truth about what has happened to her pet, the couple embarks on a series of violent arguments, one of which ends with Rod falling into an alcohol-induced sleep where he has a nightmare about participating in a Medieval Pagan festival where he is executed for the murder of the cat.

One day, when Annabel finally spots his book in a shop window, with the strangled body of her much-loved cat on the front cover, she immediately goes home and makes plans to leave Rod, who at that very moment is in a local bar drinking heavily. Rod becomes unnerved when the barmaid Eleanora gives him a stray black cat, which is identical to Annabel’s own cat. Rod notices that the inky feline has an identical white marking on its chest (an obscure white patch which seems to resemble the shape of a gallows). Rod brings the cat home and sets about to kill the feline once and for all. But Annabel intervenes and comes to the cat's rescue, causing a confrontation which ends in her gruesome and gory death when Rod hacks her to death with a meat cleaver. After shaking off his suspicious next door neighbor and landlord, Mr. Pym, who arrives after hearing the argument, Rod assures him that nothing is wrong.

Confident that he can escape detection, Rod conceals the body behind a wall in the house and invents a story to explain Annabel’s disappearance to her music students, Betty and Christian, when they show up the next day for their violin lessons. But after a confrontation with Christian, who expresses doubt and suspicion to Rod about his story of Annabel leaving him, he confides in Mr. and Mrs. Pym about his suspicions that Rod might have killed Annabel. When Annabel’s friend in New York keeps phoning the house to ask of her whereabouts, Rod becomes increasingly trapped by his own increasing elaborate web of lies. The situation is exacerbated by yet another appearance of the black cat. But this time, Rod ensures its death by slicing it in two with a saw, and disposes of it in a garbage dump.

The next day, Detective LeGrand arrives with his partner to question Rod about Annabel’s whereabouts. Despite their stern questioning, Rod is not phased by their questions. After looking around the house, the detectives leave, but immediately come back when an eerie, distorted mewing sound is heard echoing though one of the walls. Rod is handcuffed and the fake wall of that he put up is torn down and his crime scene is finally revealed. It reveals that the ever troublesome feline had given birth in Annabel’s tomb and its offspring are now feasting on the remains of their mistress. Not to be outdone, Rod grabs the pickaxe from LeGrand's partner and in seconds hacks apart both policemen. But handcuffed and in a panic, Rod tries to make his escape when his neighbors show up after nearing the commotion, pounding on the front door. Rod attempts to flee by climbing out a second floor window using a rope to tie around a tree in his backyard. But his plan fails when he gets tangled in the rope and slips, the rope tightening around his neck and killing him. The black cat makes a final appearance and stares at the fate Rod had coming for him.

Production notes

Romero collaborator Tom Savini
Tom Savini
Thomas Vincent "Tom" Savini is an American actor, stuntman, director, award-winning special effects and makeup artist. He is known for his work on the Living Dead films directed by George A. Romero, as well as Creepshow, The Burning, Friday the 13th, The Prowler, and Maniac. He directed the 1990...

 provides the film's special effects and appears briefly in "The Black Cat" episode playing a serial killer who looks like Edgar Allan Poe himself.

It was Julie Benz
Julie Benz
Julie M. Benz is an American actress, best known for her roles as Darla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and as Rita Bennett on Dexter, for which she won the 2006 Satellite Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television...

's first acting role and the first feature film she starred in. Her role in the movie is small as a teenage violin student in a few scenes in "The Black Cat" episode.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

  • Adrienne Barbeau
    Adrienne Barbeau
    Adrienne Jo Barbeau is an American actress and the author of three books. Barbeau came to prominence in the 1970s as Broadway's original Rizzo in the musical Grease, and as Carol Traynor, the divorced daughter of Maude Findlay in the sitcom Maude...

     - Jessica Valdemar
  • Ramy Zada - Dr. Robert Hoffman
  • Bingo O'Malley - Ernest Valdemar
  • Jeff Howell - Policeman
  • E.G. Marshall - Steven Pike
  • Chuck Aber
    Chuck Aber
    Chuck Aber is an American actor.A graduate of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, Aber appeared in the films Creepshow and The Silence of the Lambs , He has appeared in commercials and in the children's television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...

     - Mr. Pratt
  • Tom Atkins
    Tom Atkins (actor)
    Tom Atkins is an American television and film actor. He is primarily known for his work in the horror film genre, having worked with writers and directors such as John Carpenter, Stephen King, and George A. Romero...

     - Detective Grogan
  • Mitchell Baseman - Boy at Zoo
  • Barbara Byrne - Martha
  • Larry John Meyers - Old Man
  • Christina Romero - Mother at Zoo
  • Anthony Dileo Jr. - Taxi Driver
  • Christine Forrest - Nurse

The Black Cat

  • Harvey Keitel
    Harvey Keitel
    Harvey Keitel is an American actor. Some of his most notable starring roles were in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott's The Duellists and Thelma and Louise, Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Jane Campion's The...

     - Roderick Usher
  • Madeleine Potter
    Madeleine Potter
    Madeleine Potter is an American actress who has played supporting roles in over twenty films and TV shows, including four productions directed by James Ivory. She has also appeared in numerous stage productions in the United States and United Kingdom...

     - Annabel
  • John Amos
    John Amos
    John Amos is an American actor and former football player. His television work includes roles in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, the miniseries Roots, and a recurring role in The West Wing. He has also appeared on Broadway and in numerous motion pictures in a career that spans four decades...

     - Detective Legrand
  • Sally Kirkland
    Sally Kirkland
    Sally Kirkland is an American film and television actress.-Early life:Kirkland was named after her mother, fashion editor Sally Kirkland, who was a fashion editor at Vogue and LIFE magazines, and was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father, Frederic McMichael Kirkland, worked in the scrap...

     - Eleonora
  • Kim Hunter
    Kim Hunter
    Kim Hunter was an American film, theatre, and television actress. She won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, each as Best Supporting Actress, for her performance as Stella Kowalski in the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire...

     - Mrs. Pym
  • Holter Graham
    Holter Graham
    Holter Ford Graham is an American actor and labor union leader. He made his feature film debut at the age of 13 in the 1986 comedy-horror film Maximum Overdrive...

     - Christian
  • Martin Balsam
    Martin Balsam
    Martin Henry Balsam was an American actor. He is known for his Oscar-winning role as "Arnold Burns" in A Thousand Clowns and his role as "Detective Milton Arbogast" in Psycho.- Early life :...

     - Mr. Pym
  • Jonathan Adams - Hammer
  • Julie Benz
    Julie Benz
    Julie M. Benz is an American actress, best known for her roles as Darla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and as Rita Bennett on Dexter, for which she won the 2006 Satellite Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television...

     - Betty
  • Lanene Charters - Bonnie
  • Bill Dalzell III - Detective
  • J.R. Hall - 2nd Policeman
  • Scott House - 3rd Policeman
  • James G. MacDonald - Luke
  • Peggy Sanders - Young Policewoman
  • Lou Valenzi - Editor
  • Jeffrey Wild - Delivery Man
  • Ted Worsley - Desk Editor
  • Tom Savini
    Tom Savini
    Thomas Vincent "Tom" Savini is an American actor, stuntman, director, award-winning special effects and makeup artist. He is known for his work on the Living Dead films directed by George A. Romero, as well as Creepshow, The Burning, Friday the 13th, The Prowler, and Maniac. He directed the 1990...

    - the Monomanic (uncredited)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK