Mother of Tears: The Third Mother Review
Posted by Joseph Lee on 07.06.2008
Dario Argento's "Mother" trilogy comes to it's long-awaited conclusion!
Starring:
Asia Argento as Sarah Mandy
Daria Nicolodi as Elisa Mandy
Udo Kier as Padre Johannes
Moran Atias as Mater Lachrimarum
Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni as Giselle
Story: A young American art student unwittingly opens an ancient urn that unleashes the demonic power of the world's most powerful witch. As a scourge of suicides plague the city and witches from all over the world converge on Rome to pay homage, Sarah must use all her own psychic powers to stop the 'Mother of Tears' before her evil conquers the world.
Fun Trivia: Asia Argento and Daria Nicolodi are really mother and daughter in real life, and director Dario Argento is her father.
This film is the final part in Dario Argento's trilogy, "The Three Mothers". The previous installments were Suspiria(1977) and Inferno(1980). Twenty-seven years later, the final installment was released in Italy. Now it is on limited release in the United States before it goes to DVD later in the year. I have not seen the previous installments of the trilogy, but as a fan of Argento's other works, I was not going to pass up the opportunity to catch his latest film.
The movie begins with dramatic, ominous music and the pacing leads one to believe this is going to be a slow-moving suspense piece. After ten minutes into the movie, it's obvious this isn't the case. Once the urn is opened, all hell breaks loose as only Dario Argento can provide. The first death and the subsequent chaos are complete with a lot of gore, as well as general insanity. It's very well-crafted in the beginning with the presentation of the horrific events and sets up what should be a memorable and possibly epic horror film.
When the film shifts focus to the character played by Asia Argento is when the movie begins to fall apart. She is given the task of carrying the film on her back and unfortunately she is unable to accomplish this task. Her acting over the course of the film goes from passable to awful from scene to scene. Sometimes she resorts to random yelling, and at times appears to overact. The supporting cast doesn't help, as the villains resort to over-the-top facial expressions and acting while the others don't offer anything. Even Udo Kier feels like he's going through the motions. Some of the scenes, such as a voice coaching Sarah to use her abilities while Asia Argento closes her eyes and strains are laughable.
Another problem was the psychic powers subplot. Considering that's half of the movie, it's not well-executed. The film isn't sure if it wasn't to be a horror movie, or some sort of psychic superhero tale. It also doesn't do much in explaining exactly how and why everything is happening, instead choosing to blame it on "witchcraft" and "evil". It just screams "lazy scriptwriting" when events occur in a horror film with no explanation. Sure, everything being insane and committing these acts is good enough, but a whole movie of senseless deaths can get boring after a while.
That's not to say there aren't still some entertaining moments to be had. Argento has been around long enough that he knows how to provide the audience with lots of gruesome thrills. The death scenes throughout the film remain very gory and bloody, which should excite those who are into that sort of thing. There were even some scenes that had me shocked, as I hadn't seen anything like them before. Dario's direction itself also isn't bad, although he's not nearly as good as he once was. He still provides a quickly-paced, fluid movie.
The Mother of Tears has been drawn out for over twenty years, but yet it still feels unfinished. Maybe if some more work had been devoted to it's script and acting it could have been something classic. It's still an entertaining watch, no doubt, but outside of the graphic kills and scenes of people going insane there's not much else to enjoy.
The 411: The Mother of Tears starts out strong, and shows flashes of horrific imagery throughout, but the story itself falls apart early. Both a mediocre script and some bad acting tarnish what should have been another great Argento work. As it is, it's only a moderately entertaining horror movie with lots of blood and style but little substance.
