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Depending on how you look at it, I either have to credit or blame Edgar Allan Poe for my interest in writing — an interest that expanded into a career, actually — and my fascination with horror and the macabre. Since writing pays the bills and my various horror movie and fiction obsessions keep me sane, I guess good ol’ Edgar has done me proud. I distinctly remember reading Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in school and realizing for the first time what a potent and influential tool writing could be. It wasn’t only Poe’s vivid imagination and wildly creative style that hooked me, it was his succinct and precise use of language — how he was able to create an entire mood and sense of realism in just a scant few pages. After reading subsequent tales like “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I became a lifelong devotee of Poe and still find new nuggets of pure joy every time I crack open one of my cherished volumes of his collected works that I proudly display on my office shelf. While writers like Hawthorne and Melville certainly have their place in American literature, for me Poe remains the quintessential American voice who greatly influenced not only horror fiction, but also popularized the short story as an art form and went on to inspire the creation of Sherlock Holmes’ detective stories as well. He was also a great thinker and a superb essayist, poet and literary critic whose scathing reviews earned him the nickname “the tomahawk man.”

While there’s never been a shortage of film adaptations based on Poe’s work, few filmmakers have been able to really capture the essence of his subjective first-person and often cerebral prose. The best attempts in spirit, at least, probably remain those great Roger Corman/Vincent Price collaborations of the 1960s, in which the director/actor team clearly let their own passions for Poe shine through on the silver screen, even though they took great and often incongruent liberties with the source material. With the lone exception of writer/director Stuart Gordon’s recent Master of Horrors version of The Black Cat, in which the great Jeffrey Combs played Edgar, the only other film adaptation that came close to capturing the essence of Poe’s dark vision is the anthology project titled Two Evil Eyes which offered two different Poe tales as interpreted by friends and fellow horror auteurs George A. Romero and Dario Argento. Originally conceived as a more involved Poe anthology film akin to Romero’s own Creepshow, the project was scaled back to include just two hour-long adaptations due to timing and budget constraints. Even though I would have loved to see a couple of more notable horror directors offer their own takes on Poe stories, the resultant Two Evil Eyes is more than adequate to satisfy this particular Poe fan who also happens to be an admirer of both Romero and Argento to boot.

After a brief prologue intercut with shots of historic Poe sites including his grave in Baltimore, Maryland, Romero leads things off with his interpretation of Poe’s The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar, an obviously wise choice for the creator of the popular Night of the Living Dead and its subsequent sequels since it deals with a man who ends up becoming one of the “living dead” himself. Jessica Valdemar (Adrienne Barbeau) is an opportunist who married a wealthy older man named Ernest Valdemar (Bingo O’Malley). Sensing her husband is getting old and nearing death, Jessica plots with her secret lover, Dr. Robert Hoffman (Ramy Zada), to hypnotize her husband and get him to sign over all his wealth to her before he passes on. But while under hypnosis, Ernest actually dies and his soul becomes trapped in a netherworld between life and death. Ernest remains an inanimate corpse who speaks to Jessica and Dr. Hoffman from the beyond, begging to be released. This predicament, of course, ruins Jessica’s plans for getting her just desserts, and she and Dr. Hoffman have to find a way to still guarantee her inheritance before the authorities and, more importantly, Ernest’s savvy lawyer Steven Pike (E.G. Marshall) find out what they’ve done to the undead Mr. Valdemar.

Romero, who wrote and directed his segment, manages to retain both the framework of Poe’s original idea while injecting some of his own personality and flair into the work. The segment bears an uncanny resemblance to Romero’s similar Something to Tide You Over segment in Creepshow, based on a Poe-flavored story by Stephen King. But like all of Romero’s best work, the piece relies on solid casting and great performances. Barbeau reunites with Romero here after her extended cameo in Creepshow as Hal Holbrook’s overbearing but unforgettable wife in The Crate, one of the movie’s highlights. Playing another callous wife here with great gusto, Barbeau does some fine work comparable to the standout roles she did for then-husband John Carpenter in The Fog and Escape from New York. From the opening scene in Pike’s office, she oozes contempt and loathing for her ailing better half and makes no bones about her intention of taking him for all he’s worth. Other Romero alums like Bingo O’Malley, Tom Atkins and E.G. Marshall also do good work here, along with Romero’s wife, Christine, in a brief cameo as Valdemar’s nurse. But Romero’s most consistent and important collaborator remains off-screen — special make-up effects man Tom Savini — who once again devises some realistic make-up for the dead and, at one point, frozen Ernest Valdemar and an amazing effect where a character is impaled by an obelisk-shaped metronome.

Stepping things up a notch with his take on Poe’s The Black Cat, director Dario Argento naturally gravitates toward the more visceral and gory aspects of the author’s imagination. In this installment, Roderick Usher (Harvey Keitel) is a crime-scene photographer with a penchant for not only taking pictures of rather gruesome deaths but also for violent outbursts of his own fueled by alcoholism. When his live-in girlfriend Annabel (Madeleine Potter) takes in a stray black cat one day, Usher develops a deep-seated hatred for the new feline. During one of his drunken rages, he ends up killing the cat … only to find it return days later with an accusatory glare — and an odd white mark on its chest. Meanwhile, there’s a deranged killer on the loose and Usher’s graphic photographs of some of the killer’s handiwork — which become the basis for a book — seem a bit too convenient for comfort. Teetering on the brink of madness, Usher ends up becoming increasingly more violent himself and winds up killing Annabel’s cat yet again … only this time it ends up costing him far more than he expected. As with Poe’s original tale, Usher’s own guilt and conscience will get the better of him as the local police begin circling around him as a potential suspect.

With several clever nods to many other Poe works including “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Argento’s version of The Black Cat plays to all of the director’s strengths in terms of visual storytelling. The segment features a supporting cast of horror notables like Martin Balsam (Psycho) and Kim Hunter (Planet of the Apes) playing bit parts named after other Poe creations and even a cameo from make-up effects guru Tom Savini as a suspected killer who resembles Poe himself. Savini’s effects here, as in the Romero segment, all help to elevate the film to something more than its budget might allow: from women who have been violently cut in half to another who has had her teeth ripped out. But the real star here is Harvey Keitel, who turns in a wildly over-the-top comedic performance as the hard-drinking and rage-filled Roderick Usher. Fans of Keitel who like to quote his incessant dropping of the F-bomb from films like Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant are missing out if they haven’t witnessed his raving verbal assaults both about and to the titular black cat in this film. Thanks to Keitel, this turns out to be a rare example of Argento doing a black comedy — albeit unintentionally.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film’s original 1.85:1 aspect ratio has been slightly opened up to fill the 1.78:1 frame and is presented in a very good high-definition transfer compressed with the AVC video CODEC. This is another solid film-like transfer from Blue Underground with the appropriate and expected amount of film grain and image detail kept intact. Given the age and the budget constraints of the source material, it’s amazing how good Two Evil Eyes actually looks on this BD. While the transfer on Blue Underground’s previous DVD edition of the film was quite an upgrade over previous video releases, the Blu-ray really ups the ante in terms of picture detail and contrast. Color balance and hues are particularly strong with a consistent color palette that never blooms or bleeds. Details such as the individual hairs on the black cat and the textured flower pattern on Jessica Valdemar’s dress all look sharp, well-defined and clear. There were no signs of compression artifacts, specks or blemishes and flesh tones all looked natural and nicely-rendered. Overall, a very good and film-like video presentation.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Following the tradition of their past Blu-ray releases, Blue Underground offers Two Evil Eyes with an impressive choice of audio beginning with two solid lossless options — an English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track and a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 track — both of which provide a decent, ambient theatrical presentation. While the original 1990 audio elements sounded a bit flat and hollow, the DTS 7.1 mix does a nice job of opening up the soundtrack a bit to provide some added depth and dimension to the presentation. Although the movie doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity for aggressive, room-rattling effects, the film score by Italian composer Pino Donaggio — best known for his frequent collaboration with director Brian De Palma — is given an ample soundstage that sends discrete content to all channels. There are some nice directional sound effects spread out across the front and rear channels at times, particularly cat squeals and hisses during Argento’s segment. In contrast, Romero’s installment tends to be more dialogue-driven and center-channel heavy, with less discrete surround content. Dialogue remains clear and concise through the center channel mix while the LFE channel only gets a minimal workout during some music cues. There’s also a lossy English 5.1 EX option that doesn’t sound all that different from the other tracks. While not as stellar as its video counterpart, this is still a solid and acceptable audio presentation.

The optional subtitles are in English SDH, French and Spanish.

The Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Although not brimming with extras, the BD does offer a few interesting nuggets — all of which have been ported over from the previous DVD release and are presented in 480p — beginning with Two Masters’ Eyes (29:32), a series of interviews with directors Dario Argento and George A. Romero, special make-up effects supervisor Tom Savini, executive producer Claudio Argento, and actress Asia Argento (Dario’s daughter). Friends and fellow directors Romero and Argento discuss how much of an influence Edgar Allan Poe had on their careers. Of particular interest here is how Argento explained the project was originally envisioned to include four Poe tales each directed by four different filmmakers. The other two potential directors considered were Stephen King, who had dabbled with directing Maximum Overdrive, and John Carpenter, which would have elevated this guilty pleasure into an outright dream project for me. Sadly, funding and scheduling would preclude King and Carpenter from participating and it became a two-story, two-director project. It’s also fascinating to learn that Romero originally wanted to do a version of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” but it was deemed as being too costly to mount and he opted to tackle “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” instead.

A featurette titled Savini’s EFX (12:06) provides a behind-the-scenes look at the special make-up effects guru doing work on the movie and discussing his longtime collaboration with Romero. The similar At Home With Tom Savini (15:43), apparently taped in lieu of Savini’s planned appearance at a horror fan convention, offers a rare personal tour of Savini’s home and amazing collection of original film props and effects. Adrienne Barbeau on George Romero (4:35) is a solo interview segment in which the actress and former wife of fellow horror director John Carpenter discusses teaming with horror legend Romero for a second time after Creepshow.

The BD also includes the original theatrical trailer for Two Evil Eyes.

The 120-minute film is divided into twenty-eight chapters.

Final Thoughts

In a rare departure from their feature-film projects, friends and fellow horror auteurs George A. Romero and Dario Argento teamed up to take on adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for the anthology film Two Evil Eyes. Both directors effectively managed to pay homage to Poe’s original works while retaining some of their own tell-tale (pun intended) style, resulting in two solid short fright flicks. Despite a lackluster audio presentation and a meager collection of bonus materials, the stellar video presentation on this BD alone warrants an easy recommendation for both horror fans and non-fans alike.

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