A co-production between Argento and zombie-meister George Romero, with each directing a story 'inspired by' Edgar Allen Poe. Romero's The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar was first, and was disappointing - his strengths are in plot and characters, almost the opposite of Argento's, and it needed more inspired directing to kick some life into a story that could have come from Tales of the Unexpected; a wife (Barbeau) and her lover bumping off the husband to collect his inheritance, only to find him returning from beyond the grave. Scarcely novel stuff. The second half was Argento's, with The Black Cat. Now, my feelings about Argento should be well known to you, but in all fairness, I have to say I liked this quite a lot. Although, again, the plot is an old one - a man (Keitel) kills his wife and walls up her corpse - it had some new twists, lots of typically flashy camerawork and more than enough gore, a substance strangely lacking up to now at the festival.
