So I saw Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears at Seattle’s International Film Festival, the biggest film festival in the United States (but not North America, no, that honor goes to Toronto).

Argento’s colorful four-decade career as an Italian horror master and auteur has been well-documented and much-commented-upon. His creativity was really at its zenith in the seventies and the early eighties, when the technical limitations of the time and the zeitgeist intersected perfectly with Argento’s vision and ambitions to create a captivating aesthetic. With the mainstreaming of horror film in the eighties, Argento found himself competing with Hollywood heavy-hitters for the same, or similar, audiences, and it is my opinion that in this competition some of the vibrancy and cohesiveness of his original vision was lost –he took his eyes off the ball.

The Mother of Tears is the final installment of his “three mothers” trilogy started in 1977 with his most famous film, Suspiria, and continued with Inferno in 1980. Over thirty years after it was begun, Argento has finally got around to tying the trilogy all together. The mysterious woman glimpsed in Inferno. The obsession with architect E. Varelli. The ultimate intentions of all these witches that keep cropping up. All answers lie in the Mother of Tears.

Mother of Tears stars Argento’s own B-movie star daughter, Asia Argento, as well as his favorite lead lady from decades past, Daria Nicolodi and Udo Kier, an old-school European horror actor. Besides these latter two actors, there are a couple quick references to the previous films of the trilogy, but insider references are the one aspect of this movie that is not heavy-handed.

Though most SIFF films show twice, Mother of Tears was only shown once as a discount midnight movie. Now, why might that be? With this film, Argento is exploring the outer regions of the type of film filed under “So Bad It’s Good.” He has moved past that, far, far past. Beyond “So Bad It’s Just Bad.” Yet farther, he is stretching the limits of film towards a new horizon… changing the very meaning of the word “bad” itself, and in doing so, changing what his audience has come to expect from a horror film. It is as though he is saying “I am Dario Argento. And I do what I want,” in a profoundly authoritative voice.

The plot is nonsensical to the point that you can tell Argento (who is credited with screenwriting) just didn’t give a fuc.k. AT ALL. To talk about the “plot” would be an exercise in futility, but to discuss the cinematography is worthwhile. Apart from occasional lazy camerawork and poorly-done painted backgrounds, there are cinematic moments during Mother of Tears that hearken back to Argento’s glory days. Main character Sarah’s (Asia Argento) exploration of the old house and the catacombs is one such passage of note.

The acting is so beyond terrible that it must be purposefully wretched, as directly before Mother of Tears I saw The Last Mistress, made in 2007, in which Asia starred and did quite a respectable job, overall. In the Mother of Tears, she and the rest of the cast alternately over- and under-act, perhaps depending on their moods.

The audience alternated between hysterical laughter and frantic face-covering. The acting and dialog lead to some pretty hilarious moments, but the hilarity is brutally chopped up with spurts of incredible gore. Some have said that this is Argento’s goriest film yet. Random and poorly-executed CGI effects are sprinkled in, for no apparent reason, and probably restricted due to budget concerns. They account for the uncharacteristic jump-scares that happen a couple times during the film.

Here is an amazing sample of dialog from the beginning of the film:

Michael (Adam James): “I think that the amulets have something to do with black magic. I’ve been studying the occult sciences for years.”

Sarah: “Sciences?! Surely you don’t believe that stuff.”

I mean, come on. That has to be on purpose. Right?

Dennis Harvey of Variety got it right when he called this film a “future camp classic.”

© idyllicmollusk 6/2/08