The third
in a looooong-gestating trilogy that includes 1977's Suspiria and 1980's Inferno, Dario Argento's Mother Of Tears is a rare case where viewers can
have the exact same experience with the movie and come out with completely
divergent opinions. When the film premiered to mass bedlam in the Midnight
Madness section of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, everyone seemed to agree
that it was off-the-rails, batshit gothic camp, but couldn't agree on how to
process it. Does Argento's heady mix of ancient hunch-backed monsters, gory
disembowelments, underground lesbian orgies, and a crazed street gang straight
out of Pat Benetar's "Love Is A Battlefield" video count as inspired camp or
the embarrassing, unintentional kind? Are we laughing with Argento or at him,
or does it really matter in the end?
If you're a
fan of Argento's, it does matter, and watching the once-great stylist continue his
nearly two-decade-long decline with Mother Of Tears isn't all that amusing. Granted,
loving Argento has always meant putting up with his indifference to the
performances of his oft-overdubbed Europudding casts or the cheesy, expository
dialogue that would come out of their mouths. But in his best work—like Suspiria, Deep Red, and Opera, to name three—Argento put
together sequences that were bold, colorful, and graphically striking in ways
that no other horror filmmaker could master. And that's what's missing in the
haphazard glop of mythology and mayhem that comprise Mother Of Tears.
After a
construction worker discovers an ancient urn by flipping his front-loader
ass-over-teakettle into a hole in the ground—the first indication of much
more silliness to come—it falls to Rome museum curator Asia Argento to
puzzle over its contents. The urn turns out to be a Pandora's Box of evil
surprises, setting off a citywide plague of possession that leads to a woman
getting strangled by her own intestines, a mother lobbing her baby over a
bridge, and other grisly cult-like behavior. Compared to a recent Argento dud
like The Stendhal Syndrome, Mother Of Tears at least has some of the go-for-broke gothic spirit of his
earlier work. He's just lost the ability to shape it into something artful