Two Evil Eyes

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40-year-old Jessica Valdemar visits Steven Pike, her elderly husband Ernest's lawyer, with paperwork for Pike's approval. Pike sees that the 65-year-old Valdemar, who is dying from a terminal illness, is liquidating a number of his assets for cash and suspects Jessica of having undue influence on him. Pike talks to Ernest Valdemar over the phone and he confirms the decision. Pike reluctantly agrees to let Jessica have access to the money, but warns her that if anything were to happen to 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 Valdemar's mansion where she meets with Dr. Robert Hoffman. Hoffman and Jessica have been conspiring to cheat Ernest out of his estate by hypnotizing him and having him do what they wish from his deathbed. Robert wants to elope with Jessica after they acquire Valdemar's assets. Later, Ernest dies while under hypnosis. Wanting to keep his death secret for the time being, Robert and Jessica hide his body in the basement freezer. During the night, Jessica hears moaning coming from the basement but cannot wake up Robert, who has put himself into hypnotically induced sleep.

The next morning, Jessica and Robert hear the moaning from the basement. They open the freezer and Valdemar's voice claims that his soul is alive and trapped in a dark void between the living and the dead. Valdemar tells them that he sees "others" looking at him. Jessica withdraws $300,000 from a bank and stores it in a safe, an action Robert sees. Valdemar's undead corpse tells Robert that the "Others" are vengeful spirits that want to use him to enter our world. Valdemar tells Robert to wake him up from his hypnotic state. In a panic, Jessica shoots Valdemar's corpse, planning to bury the body and leave town with the money they have. While Robert heads outside to dig the grave, Jessica goes back into the cellar only to find Valdemar's body walking towards her, saying that he is controlled by "the Others". Robert returns inside 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 attempts to wake Valdemar from his hypnosis but Valdemar tells Robert that it is too late, 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, where he puts himself into a hypnotic sleep. The ghostly "Others" then enter his apartment and kill him by ramming his digital metronome into his chest. The ghosts then form themselves into a mist and enter Robert's body.

Several days later the police, led by Detective Grogan, arrive to answer complaints about a "strange smell" and constant moaning coming from the apartment. Grogan finds the apartment ransacked. The decomposed body of Robert, under the control of "the Others", appears and attacks Grogan while telling him that there is nobody to wake him up and that he is trapped forever.

Crime scene photographer Rod Usher enters 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 frequently called upon by the local authorities, led by Detective LeGrand, to document crime scenes in the area.

After arriving at his house, Rod is developing photos in his darkroom when his work is interrupted by the appearance of a black cat, which has apparently been adopted by his live-in girlfriend Annabel. Annabel is a violinist who gives private lessons to local high school students, which they attend at the house after their school classes.

Over the next several days, an antipathy grows between Rod and the cat, worsened by Annabel's excessive protectiveness 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 subject. Rod then uses the photos of him strangling the cat in his newest photography book, Metropolitan Horrors. As Annabel begins to realize what has happened to her pet, the couple argues violently and Rod has a nightmare set in medieval Europe in which he is impaled for murdering the cat.

Some time later Annabel spots his book in a shop window, with the strangled cat on the front cover. Overcome by horror, she makes plans to leave Rod. Meanwhile, Rod is drinking heavily at a local bar. He becomes unnerved when the barmaid, Eleonora, gives him a stray black cat, identical to Annabel's cat. Rod notices that the feline has an identical white marking on its chest like a gibbet and noose. Rod brings the cat home and sets about killing it again, but Annabel rescues it; their argument becomes physical and culminates in Rod killing her with a meat cleaver. When his suspicious next-door neighbor and landlord, Mr. Pym, arrives at his door, Rod assures him that nothing is wrong.

Rod conceals Annabel's remains behind a wall 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. Christian, who doubts Rod's story, confides in Mr. Pym and his wife Gloria about his suspicions that Rod might have killed Annabel. When a friend of Annabel's in New York keeps phoning the house to ask about her whereabouts, Rod disconnects the phone. Rod then hears scratching sounds from behind the wall in which he has entombed Annabel - the black cat, which is forcing its way through the soft plaster. When the cat appears from behind the wall, Rod kills it with a saw and disposes of it in a dumpster.

The next day, Detective LeGrand arrives with his partner to question Rod about Annabel's whereabouts. After looking around the house, the detectives leave but return when a mewling sound is heard through one of the walls. Rod is handcuffed and the fake wall he put up is torn down, revealing that the cat had given birth in Annabel's tomb and its offspring are now feasting on the remains of their mistress. Rod grabs a pickaxe from LeGrand's partner and kills both policemen, then tries to make his escape when his neighbors arrive at the front door after hearing the commotion. Rod attempts to climb out a second floor window by using a rope tied around a tree in his backyard. However, he gets tangled in the rope and slips, the rope tightening around his neck and ultimately hanging him. The black cat makes a final appearance, and stares at Rod's final fate.

George A. Romero and Dario Argento first worked together on Dawn of the Dead back in 1978 where the collaboration led to the two developing a mutual respect for each other.^[1] Shortly after the failure of Romero's Monkey Shines, Argento approached Romero about an anthology project, under the working title of Poe, he and his brother Claudio were working on that would be based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe to which Romero agreed to join wanting to get his mind off the failure of Monkey Shines.^[1] Two Evil Eyes was originally intended to be an anthology film consisting of four segments based on Poe stories, each by a different director.^[6] John Carpenter, Clive Barker, and Stephen King were considered to direct two of the segments, but Carpenter had scheduling issues, and King was uninterested in serving as a director again after his experience directing the 1986 film Maximum Overdrive.^[6][1] After planning around the schedules of four different directors proved to be too complicated, it was decided to pare the film down to a three part anthology with Argento attempting to convince Wes Craven to sign on to direct the third segment, but once again scheduling and negotiating conflicts saw this approach abandoned and Argento decided his name in combination with Romero's would be enough for a viable film package.^[1]

For Argento's segment, he chose to adapt "The Black Cat" with frequent collaborator Franco Ferrini.^[1] Romero had initially wanted to adapt "The Masque of the Red Death" with Donald Sutherland, who would serve as a link between Argento's and Romero's segments. However, upon learning that Argento didn't want any historical period settings for the segments, Romero rewrote the story to take place in the future, an approach that was met with a negative reaction from Argento, who felt it would invite comparisons to the classic 1964 film version made by Roger Corman. The creative conflict between Argento and Romero was resolved after Corman announced his own remake of Masque of the Red Death, which resulted in Romero opting to instead adapt "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar".^[1]

Two Evil Eyes marked Argento's first time directing a wholly American production and necessitated the first time he'd needed to employ a dialogue coach.^[1]

Romero collaborator Tom Savini provided the special make-up and gore effects for Two Evil Eyes.^[7][8] Savini also appears briefly in "The Black Cat" episode as The Monomaniac,^[5] a killer who rips out his victim's teeth.^[8]

Two Evil Eyes was Julie Benz's first acting role and the first feature film she starred in. Benz appears as teenage violin student Betty in a few scenes of "The Black Cat" segment. Benz's voice was dubbed in the Italian-language version of the film by Dario Argento's daughter, Asia.

Two Evil Eyes holds a rating of 63% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 19 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7/10.^[9] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 61 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[10]

In the book Art of Darkness: The Cinema of Dario Argento, a reviewer wrote of the film that, "Romero was a bizarre choice of director for an adaptation of Poe," and that Romero's segment lacked "any of the director's own trademarks: his striking use of space and editing, the moments of bleak surrealism and dark irony."^[11] Though he commended Tom Savini's effects work, Gallant concluded that "the twin halves of Two Evil Eyes make utterly inappropriate bedfellows, coming from two directors whose styles, even at their best, would make an incongruous combination."^[11]