Facts in the life of Mr. Valdemar (directed by George A. Romero)
An elderly landowner is slowly being led to his death by the attending physician who, in cahoots with the rich man's young wife (Adrienne Barbau) who, in fact, is also his mistress, aims for the inheritance...
To formalize the bequest of his property to his wife, Valdemar is induced by the doctor, through hypnosis, to sign a will.
But in that very context the man, now seriously ill, dies.
In order to carry out the inheritance paperwork, in consultation with the probate lawyer, Valdemar's death must be prospected by a few days, and the two lovers decide to keep the corpse in an optimal state by freezing his body.
But under these conditions, the man manifests his revival: having died in a state of hypnosis, the soul has not left the body, and its presence (characterized by screams and moans designed to invoke total death by awakening from the mesmeric state) opens the gateway for access to the world of the living to the souls of other, much more ferocious and vengeful spectres...
The black cat (directed by Dario Argento)
Roderick Usher (Harvey Keitel), a crime photographer, is morbidly drawn to images of violence and death. He is always present at the sites of brutal crimes, documenting in great detail details of amputated bodies (a victim sawed in two by a huge pendulum), or corpses in an advanced state of decomposition (a psychopath exhumed his cousin to extract all her teeth)...
His latest project, a book with images designed to salve the appetite of “sadists,” involves a black cat subjected to torture documented in photographic sequence.
Annabel (Madeleine Potter), Usher's domestic partner, notices that the (black) cat she is strongly attached to is missing.
Passing by a bookstore, the girl discovers the edition of Usher's photo book, in which the image of the black cat subjected to torture stands out on the cover.
The connection is immediate, not least because the cohabitant on several occasions abused the animal.
After a furious quarrel, Usher, in a fit of madness, kills Annabel...
But the presence of another black cat, with a strange white spot (shaped like a halter), continues to nag at the photographer, even as he concocts a plan to make it look like Annabel has abandoned him...
The film, in its initial intentions, was to be co-directed by four big names in the international horror scene (the other two were Carpenter and Craven) and feature several episodes from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Surviving work commitments threatened to scuttle the project, so Argento and Romero decided to complete the work anyway, via two medium-length films (nearly an hour each)...
If the episode directed by Romero is perhaps the one most imbued with meaning (moral even if, at times, trivially predictable) and renders the sense of the original tale quite well, Dario's, strengthened by a pertinent musical accompaniment (by Pino Donaggio), particularly strong images (by Savini who, in the episode, plays the maniac who exhumed his cousin to extract her teeth) and accurate representation (curious, e.g., the cat's subjectivities), at the final rendition appears decidedly more successful.
Argento, for the first and only time grappling with a story that does not belong to him, nevertheless shows that he is genuinely fond of the melancholy Poe by inserting here and there several cues from other tales (The Well and the Pendulum, Berenice) and overall directs at his best a group of decidedly significant actors (Keitel above all).
Brief cameo by Martin Balsam in an homage quote to his performance, for Hitchcock, in the very famous Psycho.
Overall a curious and successful work, even if it does not represent the best that has been achieved cinematically based on Poe's stories.
Review by Undying1
