Two Evil Eyes

The risk of an anthology movie is that abbreviating a story can make it suffer, feeling incomplete or shallow. But the flip side is that there's another story coming soon, so there's a chance that one will redeem the overall package. Two Evil Eyes only has two stories, and it's two hours long, meaning each one is an hour. That's a long time to spend with a story with another one, but only another one, on the horizon. Two chances to hit it out of the park ... and two chances to whiff. Unfortunately, it's the latter, as nothing here comes together the way it should, resulting in two stories that are somehow too long but too flimsy to be as long as they are. Part of the problem is theme of the movie. The two stories are based on Edgar Allen Poe stories. The first one is directed by George Romero, and the second by Dario Argento. Poe stories have a feel to them, a natural gothic, sinister, but simple atmosphere. Unlike Lovecraft, he didn't need a complex mythos. Poe's horrific tales were ones of morality and the monsters inside human beings. These can be modernized and told in the present day, but it's all about striking the right atmosphere, and neither Romero or Argento do it here. Both stories not only lack the proper atmosphere, they have too much of the wrong kind. Colors are vivid, lighting is bright, but in a cheap way, giving the movie the feeling of both an 80's soap opera and a low-budget syndicated show. It feels like they directed two episodes of Tales From The Darkside or Friday The 13th: The Series and cut them together. The acting isn't dramatic, it's melodramatic, making the stories feel corny. The score is too lush and never strikes the right mood. All of these directorial choices point to the second big problem: these were not the right men for the jobs. Romero and Argento have their own styles. Romero tends to explore the space he's in, using unique angles to visualize how off-balance the characters are in a given situation, and there's always an attempt at some wry, sardonic wit. Even in movies of his I didn't like -- Martin, Bruiser, Land Of The Dead -- his style comes through. Chronologically speaking, this is Romero's least Romero-like movie since There's Always Vanilla. There's one or two fun shots, but 99% of it is shot plainly and flatly, like a TV show. Argento's story is no better; there are no traces of his more European style, no signatures of giallo like weird color filters or bright splashes of blood, no nothing. All of his style has been squeezed out, just like Romero's. Three creators are paired up here, and none of them are shown in their best light. Or even a decent one. And finally, there's the format of the movie itself. Two stories at an hour apiece means there has to be a lot to these stories, but not so much that it feels over-stuffed. Unfortunately, both stories suffer from the same problem of not having enough meat on the bone. They feel like rejected scripts from Creepshow 2, but they only had two, so the scripts got stretched too far. Movies like Creepshow or Tales From The Darkside would give you three, four, even five stories with a wraparound to boot, so if the current story didn't hit, another was around the corner. That's not a luxury Two Evil Eyes has. The viewer is stuck with two stories that are entirely too long, and neither are worth the effort. From reading about the movie, I learned it was supposed to be four stories, but the other two had to be cut because the chosen directors couldn't or wouldn't participate, and you can feel it with every creeping, crawling minute that this movie puts itself through a taffy puller and stretches things out beyond its natural limits. In the End, what you have with Two Evil Eyes is three iconic names in horror coming together and somehow the result is lesser than the three of them. Neither director are suited to the material and the material isn't suited to the format, leaving everybody under-served, and the audience with a pair of half-baked stories that have everything working against them. When the other two directors bowed out, the whole thing should've been shelved.