Nothing's shocking

by Andy Klein

The Mother of Tears
Starring: Asia Argento, Adam James, Cristian Solimeno, Daria Nicolodi, Udo Kier, Valeria Cavalli and Philippe Leroy. Directed by Dario Argento. 98 min. Rating N/A.

There are many different kinds of horror films. Dario Argento has long been the most visible proponent of a particularly Italian flavor that has had considerable influence on several waves of American productions. His latest, The Mother of Tears, has its moments, but it really can’t supersede my fondness for his much earlier stuff.

Back in the ’60s, Argento worked on numerous screenplays, including, most famously, Sergio Leone’s great Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), for which he shares story credit with Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. (Talk about diverging paths!)

He made his directorial debut in 1970, with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a slasher film based (without permission) on American writer Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi, which had been officially adapted in 1958 as a Hollywood vehicle for Anita Ekberg. (I’m a big Brown fan, and, 15 years later, the Brown estate’s executor still referred angrily to “that Italian guy.”)

Argento achieved his greatest fame with 1977’s Suspiria, which is the epitome of his best and worst traits. That is, its visual style — particularly the outrageous climax — stays with you forever. But the plot is hard to remember much about, assuming you even comprehended it in the first place. For a guy who started out as a writer, Argento has surprisingly seemed more concerned about the look of his films than the stories.

The Mother of Tears is the final entry in his Three Mothers trilogy, following Suspiria and Inferno (1980). I think its story rehashes elements from its predecessors, but, since my brain has a hard time recalling the details of their plots, I may be overstating the case.

Asia Argento — the director’s daughter, who started out in her father’s films and has since had a decent American career — plays Sarah Mandy, an assistant at the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome. When a mysterious package arrives for Michael — her boss (and lover) — she and co-worker Giselle (Coralina Cataldi Tassoni) are so intrigued they can’t wait for him to get back to the museum before opening it. Big mistake.

Inside are three little statues and what appears to be a rune-covered sweatshirt. Luckily, Sarah is out of the room when Giselle reads the inscription aloud, so she doesn’t exactly have to witness three demons (and a monkey) disemboweling her friend and then strangling her with her own entrails. We, of course, do.

Strange things start happening: Sarah hears an apparently benevolent voice in her head, telling her how to get out of tight spots; a sinister group of goth types starts stalking her; and Rome is suddenly plagued by outbreaks of violence and madness (which doesn’t stop most of the populace from nonchalantly going about their business).

Sarah is sent from one magic expert to another, gleaning a little bit of the backstory from each before they too are dispatched by demons. She learns there were three dormant witches of great power: the first was eradicated by the heroine of Suspiria, and the second by Sarah’s mother (Daria Nicolodi) in Inferno. The last (and worst) is the Mother of Tears. Sarah and Giselle’s meddling has resurrected her, and it’s up to Sarah — who has just discovered supernatural powers of her own — to kill her before all of Rome descends into chaos.

In short, we get repetitions of elements from the earlier films, which were pretty much sub-Exorcist mumbo jumbo in the first place. Back then, it was the outrageous visual style and the even more outrageous gore that compensated for the script deficiencies. But in recent years, Argento has lacked either the inclination or budget to crank up the style; and there are no longer any gore effects we haven’t seen a hundred times in American indies. Eye-gouging tool? Ho hum. Huge spear rammed up the vagina? Been there, done that. (Only in the sense of movie-watching, natch.)

Add to that some really bad dialogue, awkward looping, and “magical” bits that are too close to The Wizard of Oz not to get a chuckle. The ghost of Sarah’s long-dead mom keeps showing up like Glinda the Good Witch, played, of course, by Nicolodi, Dario’s wife and Asia’s real mother. (Strangely, mom has continued to age in the afterlife.)

All of which doesn’t mean The Mother of Tears isn’t goofy fun, in its own way. But it’s the same goofy fun we have seen in dozens of other films for years now, by Argento and others. And it’s getting kind of old.