Before watching Two Evil Eyes, you would be forgiven for assuming that director Dario Argento was the hanger-on. Originally planned to include sequences by Argento, John Carpenter, and writer Stephen King, Argento certainly seems like the odd man out. Carpenter and Romero seem like an obvious match, and King and Romero had already collaborated on the phenomenal Creepshow, a deliriously kooky anthology horror film that fully recaptured the spirit of the EC Comics horror tales. (Carpenter, too, had already directed an adaptation of King’s Christine). The obvious impetus for this film is Creepshow and Romero’s subsequent, lesser Tales from the Darkside show (also adapted into a 1990 film whose best segment also features a fiendish feline), and Argento, who didn’t usually sign on for this sort of thing, may have just been along for the ride.

After watching, it’s hard to imagine how Romero could have been the shepherd here, unless the process of losing Carpenter and King’s contributions simply gutted him. His adaptation of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” is a mostly limited affair, which builds to a brief but impressively icy climax before undercutting it with a ludicrously chintzy post-climax. It isn’t without merit, but it does little for the generally lagging reputation of many of the ‘70s horror maestros during the turn of the ‘90s (one of the worst eras for horror ever).

The Argento half, however? Diabolically good, nothing less than the maestro’s last great aria. Harvey Keitel stars as Roderick Usher, here depicted as a malevolent photographer rather than the suffering scion of a mostly-deceased family. After he tortures the cat of his live-in partner Annabel (Madeleine Potter), the cat starts a turf war with Keitel (already a description that should have you salivating), up to and including murdering Annabel in his own rage-ful frustration. From there, we’re off to a ludicrously overstuffed attempt to cram as many Poe short stories as Argento can cut up and Frankenstein together, something you might already have gleamed from the references I’ve already given to multiple Poe characters, none of whom appear in the titular “Black Cat.”

The looseness of this vision of Poe is no strange feat– missing the point of Poe’s fiction in your cinematic adaptation of Poe was already a time-honored and cherished art by 1990, and is all just part of the fun. But Argento elevates his adaptation by doing a wonderfully poor clean up job, smashing together the corpses of so many Poe stories and letting the stitches loosen so the blood can seep through the cracks. It’s not so much an adaptation as an anthology, a mosaic of half-glimpsed dispatches straining to be seen through the blood, to be noticed through all the mischief, each madly shouting to out-do the others. This is a gleefully sloppy, slippery, headstrong whirlwind of an adaptation, maddeningly rushing between Poe stories with little regulation or discretion. That does more to capture the manic feel of Poe’s shorter works than any more straightforward adaptation could. The film is a paradox: precisely blunt, tightly unwound, far too short to tell anything resembling a coherent or cohesive story and yet so thoroughly kinetic that any added second would exhaust the energy. It is a sledgehammer scalpel. Each new edit could sever a femoral artery.

Cinema is cinema, in other words, and Argento’s film is thoroughly cinematic, veracity to the stories be damned. His rushing camera tracks forward to clarify a suppressed emotion on a character’s face or tracks back as Annabel finds herself suddenly moved from a city street into a portrait of cosmic loneliness. A camera tracks along a pendulum that has recently cut a body in half, before Argento cuts to Usher splicing a new frame into a camera reel, tethering cinematic and corporeal violence. Later, when Usher viciously holds down the cat to take photographs of it for his urban horrors photograph book, Argento stages a perverse gestalt in which the photographic instruments look like torture instruments from hell, assembling a suggestive sequence of torturous malevolence without really showing anything. Even in this shortened form, Argento seems to have it out for his medium of choice.

Turning your horror film into an auto-critique of cinematic horror was nothing new for horror or for Argento, but The Black Cat sinks its teeth in with real vivacity. Argento makes the gleefully mischievous decision to re-stage the Cask of Amontillado behind a wall of VHS’s, and when the body is nearly walled-in, the smug face of John Wayne’s The Searchers looks on with a dastardly smirk. And when Usher initially discovers that the cat has smuggled its way into the wall, and has to open it to stop the noise, Argento gets one shot of Usher framed between the bookshelves that hide the false-wall while the lights in the room drop out, trapping him a black box theater from the depths of a deranged soul. None of this is particularly sophisticated, but it’s wickedly good stuff, a trim terror of bite-sized horror that bites off more than it can chew and cheers manically as it chokes on itself.

Score:

Overall: 6/10

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar: 4/10

The Black Cat: 8/10