Mother of Tears (2007)
The long-anticipated (well not long-anticipated by me, since I only just thought of seeing it last month) capper to Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy–maybe something good, maybe something bad? Well, more the latter really.
Why so serious?
Premise : 2/5
The one thing that Mother of Tears has over Suspiria and Inferno is that it actually has a stable plotline, more or less. Of course, that’s not always a strength, because the plot’s actually pretty cliche in a bunch of places.
On the site of an old church in Rome, some recent grounds work accidentally dug up a casket with an urn chained to it. After sending it to a history museum to get the runes and artifacts inside researched, all hell basically breaks loose. The first person to crack open the urn and start playing with the items inside it causes a big earthquake–which is, however, the least of her worries as she then gets set upon by 3 demon things which hold her down and ram a “pear of anguish” into her mouth at full extension. Ouch! Then she gets disemboweled, and as she’s trying to run away with her bowels falling out, one of these demonic figures starts scooping them up and strangling her with them. On a list of truly bad ways to go, this has got to be near the top.
Meanwhile, shit goes wild on the streets. Dozens of people start committing suicide, mass murder is rampant, and we even get to see an apparently loving mother out with her baby in a stroller on a walk pick up the baby and drop it off a bridge (bouncing off the bridge first, just for extra nasty) into the water below. Then planeloads, busloads, and trainloads of “witches” (they really look more like a bunch of models and drag queens on their way back from a reunion tour for The Cure) descend on Rome and cackle at people.
I never figured out what Lo Pan was doing in this movie.
Somehow or another, a woman named Sarah Mandy is going to have to put a stop to the madness by taking on Mater Lacrymarum herself. And this is part of the stupid cliche stuff that bugged me about this movie: Sarah’s mother was apparently a powerful white witch who once took on Mater Suspiriorum before being killed herself. Naturally Sarah never knew about this, but her ghost mom talks to her all Ben Kenobi style and tells her how to make herself invisible and that she has to learn to fight. Really? The weak-ass Jedi crap was the BEST they could come up with? And after once or twice of becoming invisible, that whole “magic” thing is thrown out the window and all Sarah has to do is strip Mater Lacrymarum’s super-magical shirt off with a spear and throw it in a fire? And then the whole place collapses? And who puts the majority of their power in one single item so that they can be useless without it? (Hell, at least Sauron still had some kind of power, and Frodo had to get his ass to Mordor and destroy that ring in a fancy way–I mean, what if Mater Lacrymarum had a cooking accident? Doom!)
Anyways, I appreciated the expanded attention to backstory and filling in the mythology gaps that Mother of Tears gave me, but that’s about it. Everything else is just an excess of gore and average movie-making at best. And that’s a damn shame, because what was so effective about Suspiria and Inferno was the fact that they took you into another headspace and were quite unlike your average horror movie. This is all average horror movie (plus tons of gore) with a kind of interesting story that just . . . well, ends. While it probably could’ve been an OK if not great horror movie on its own, when measured up against the first two “Mother” movies, this doesn’t stack up at all. There’s very little satisfaction in this “wrap-up ” and just left me wondering where the real Argento film was.
Eye scream, you scream, we all scream for eyes scream.
Cast: 2/5
Disclaimer: most of the acting in this movie really sucks. That being said, though, Sarah’s boyfriend Michael (played by Adam James) is pretty okay. He seems to act reasonably well and seems to sell the academian charmer thing well enough. Almost everyone else is just goofy or wooden–I suppose I should be used to that by now, though. I just expected more because basically all the stuff that I usually like in Argento movies is kind of absent here.
However, I do like looking at Asia Argento (who plays Sarah) an awful lot. She’s not terribly good at acting here, not even all that “okay ” either, but she’s easy on the eyes. So if the acting’s gotta be bad, at least have a hot girl to make it more bearable. I can live with that decision.
"Hi, I'm Mater Lacrymarum. I hope you've been enjoying this review and--"
Technical: 2/5
This is just depressing–everything is shot so conventionally (with a couple exceptions: chase cam work that Raimi’s been doing since forever, and long full-motion hallway shots). Gone are the amazing sets and weirdly beautiful shots , gone’s the trippy or evocative music. Instead of surreal elegance, we get buckets and buckets of gore and grodiness. There’s nothing wrong with that generally, but that’s not what Suspiria and Inferno were about. In fact, it’s a bit more like Demons 2 with lotsa gore and a plot that almost seems cribbed from The Church, only without any flair. There’s nothing awful in this department, but it just comes up uninspired and far too depressingly average.
"--OWWW! What the HELL, man?! Did you think this was 'Hot Fuzz' or something?!"
Popcorn Factor: 3/5
There’s a lot of blood, gore, and violence, and plenty of naked breasts plus one lesbian scene. There’s also a lot of beautiful women and the plot does keep moving, which is kind of nice. Some of the murders were pretty brutal and unexpected, but for some reason I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I was secretly watching an ultra-graphic comedy. The plot’s decent, the acting’s not, and the violence is so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. I might have really liked this movie if it wasn’t a follow up to Suspiria and Inferno, but since it is I can’t help but feel ripped off and let down.