Release Year: 2007
Country: Italy
Starring: Asia Argento, Cristian Solimeno, Adam James, Moran Atias, Valeria Cavalli, Philippe Leroy, Daria Nicolodi , Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Udo Kier, Robert Madison, Jun Ichikawa, Tommaso Banfi, Paolo Stella.
Writer: Jace Anderson, Dario Argento, Walter Fasano, Adam Gierasch, Simona Simonetti
Director: Dario Argento
Cinematographer: Frederic Fasano
Music: Claudio Simonetti
Producer: Claudio Argento, Dario Argento, Giulia Marletta
Original Title: La Terza madre
Availability: Buy it from Amazon

OK, that’s it. As of this film, Dario Argento officially needs to be simultaneously punched in the face and given a great big ol’ hug. Fans like me have been waiting for years for this, the final film in Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy that began with Suspiria and continued with Inferno. In my opnion, Suspiria is a masterpiece, albeit one with more than a few bizarre script pitfalls (the room full of uncoiled barbed wire???), and while Inferno has its flaws, I think it’s still a pretty tremendous film. Horror fans have waited for Mother of Tears with the same giddy anticipation people had waiting for The Phantom Menace and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yeah, you can already see where this is going, can’t you? Fans of Dario Argento held out hope for this film despite the fact that Argento’s career since the late 1980s is comprised almost exclusively of movies fighting for the title of “worst piece of crap he ever made.” And unfortunately, Argento delivers a film about on par with the disappointment people felt after seeing Phantom Menace and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The only difference is that after my initial disappointment wears off, I think I’ll be able to enjoy Mother of Tears as one of the truly great awful films of all time.

The worst thing about this film is that it’s obviously the work of a director who doesn’t give a shit. This movie wasn’t made because Argento finally had an awesome idea for the third film in his unfinished trilogy; it was made because Argento’s career continues to flounder, and he knew that churning out the much-anticipated third film would make him some cash, since chumps like me would see this one even if we hadn’t managed to finish any of his films since Opera, and even if everyone in the world told us ahead of time what a crass piece of garbage the movie was.

Almost every single thing in this movie is poorly done, and I have to assume that the only way it ever got released is because Argento threw up his hands and said, “Fuck the fans; they’ll watch it no matter how shitty it is.” Almost every single thing about this film is incompetently executed with the exception of Argento’s ability to keep the camera in focus. Since I’ve been watching a lot of films lately where the director and DP seemed unable to manage even that, I will give Argento credit where it is due. This film was shot in focus. The rest of it, however, reads like a laundry list of idiotic ideas that never should have been written down, let alone filmed.

The story is simple enough. A long time ago, there were three witches of immense power. One way or another, each of them was beaten and confined to a life in which they spent most of their time scheming for the day they would reclaim the world and usher in a new era of darkness. The other two witches having been dispatched in the previous two films, it’s up to the most evil of them all, the Mother of Tears, to bring their nightmare to fruition. Standing in her way is Asia Argento, looking more haggard than usual as an art historian with latent psychic powers. From the get-go, pretty much everything about this movie is wrong. We open with a scene of ridiculous splatter gore that seems out of place in an Argento film. His movies were always brutal and violent, but they were rarely splatter fests. This scene, and many that come after it, look less like Argento cynically retreading his own stuff and more like Argento making a Lucio Fulci fanfic movie. On top of that, Asia gives what has to be one of the worst performances of her career, delivering tin-eared dialogue with no commitment and an awkward lack of interest that makes the stupidity of each line shine through.

The Mother of Tears, when she is released, ends up being a twenty-something porn model with huge, fake boobs — those ridiculous, spherical looking ones that I thought people stopped getting in the 80s when fake boob technology made a leap forward. She spends most of the movie naked on a stone altar beneath Rome, writhing around and hissing out more ludicrous dialogue. Upon her release, all the evil witches of the world descend upon Rome, and it turns out that the harbingers of man’s doom are mostly obnoxious goth girls from the 1980s who express their supreme commitment to evil by doing things like being loud in the airport, making “I’m crazy and sticking out my tongue” faces at businessmen, and other such juvenile activities generally ascribed to first-year punk rockers trying to “freak out the squares.”

Asia is alternately pursued by them and the cops, who want to talk to hr about some murders, as all of Rome descends into violent madness. Violent madness is represented by scenes of a woman throwing her baby off a bridge (complete with hilariously fake baby doll bouncing off a stone ledge) and guys on various backlot sets stabbing each other.

Asia discovers that the only way to beat the Mother of Tears is for her to unlock her own psychic powers, and to accomplish this she is coached briefly by the ghost of her mother (Daria Nicolodi, also her mother in real life), who appears as a laughable “Obiwan Kenobi” special effect. Then, after all that talk, she just throws something at the Mother of Tears and kills her, never once having to rely on any psychic powers.

Oh man, this movie is awful enough that it deserves a full review. It’d take pages just to catalog the sheer idiocy tat defines each frame of this movie. The script is so bad that I started wishing for the refined wit of Shaitani Dracula again. No one seems to have put any effort into any part of this movie. Rarely does one encounter such bald-faced contempt for fans as one will encounter with Mother of Tears. About the only good thing I can say is that there’s a pretty bad-ass monkey working for the Mother of Tears, but even I can’t approve an entire film based solely on the inclusion of a scary monkey in a couple scenes. Argento would have been better served by making a movie in which this evil monkey battles the heroic chimp from Phenomena.

And yet, the thing is so horrendously awful, so irredeemably bad in every facet, so completely absurd, that as I said, once I get over being a fan of Argento burned yet again by the once-great director’s plummet into the fires of total worthlessness, I think I’m going to love this film. It possesses not a glimmer of any of the flourishes that made the first two films so memorable, but it possesses so many awful qualities in such quantity that it almost becomes some forsaken monument to everything that stinks in cinema. Going in, I was warned ahead of time that it was going to be bad, but I was astounded by by how much worse it was than I expected, just as I will eventually be delighted by the fact that it’s so bad in such a bonkers way. I mean, Argento’s films have sucked for the past twenty years, but this one elevates his game to a whole new level of awful.