Collaborative effort of George Romero and Dario Argento -- collaborating this time not as director and producer, as they had done in the past, but as co-directors, not literally sharing the workload but splitting it roughly down the middle. More exactly, adapting separate Edgar Allan Poe stories, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and "The Black Cat," and then joining the two tail to head. Thus, in the first half the camera will not move much; in the second it will move compulsively. And in the first half the gore will get postponed till later, while in the second it gets going right away. In the first half, once again, a body is being dragged down the stairs when someone comes to the front door, and in the second a body is being dragged up the stairs when someone comes to the front door. Differences abound. Romero's principal strength, here as elsewhere, is his willingness to play the game seriously. (It helps to have Adrienne Barbeau digging into her role -- "I'm having a hard time with this. I need you to be sensitive to that" -- as if she were doing Eugene O'Neill.) But at a little less than an hour, the present game feels a little overlong. Partly, no doubt, Poe's fault. (As Roger Corman so frequently found out in the early Sixties, Poe doesn't give a screenwriter much to work with.) At a little above an hour, but faster moving, the Argento half is both more ambitious and less serious: more florid embellishment of the original story, but also some silly allusions to other Poe stories. With Harvey Keitel and Madeleine Potter. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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