Review of Dario Argento's Three Mothers Trilogy
Italian Horror Filmmaker Continues Tales of Occult and Witchcraft
Aug 6, 2008
Bizarro filmmaker Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) is a chilling, stylish, but greatly overrated Italian horror opus. The weak plot is short on sense and less than coherent, as a young American ballet dancer (Jessica Harper) arrives at a prestigious European dance academy that by a turn of bizarre goings-on and murders it's discovered to be run by a coven of witches. Good of its sort, but burdened by slow pacing and, as Argento is known for, a barely comprehensive narrative---the killings seem to have little connection with final payoff.
Although in its defense, the film's liabilities are greatly overcome by Argento's surreal, uniquely beautiful style and trademark touches of violence: a terrifyingly gory opening kill like none other, haunting musical score (by Goblin with the collaboration of the direction), and creepy atmosphere with psychadelic red-tint lighting. Slasher audiences may be disappointed, even if red-paint blood still flows throughout, but cult devotees won't want to overlook it.
- 2 and a half stars out of 4.
Incoherence Continues In Inferno
Three years later, Inferno (1980) sustains Argento's baroque but incomprehensible approach. As the story goes, an American music student (Leigh McCloskey) rushes to New York from his studies in Rome after a frantic phone call from his poet sister. She is certain she's found a book which identifies her old apartment building as the residence of the Mater Tenebrarum, one of three evil witches who produce misery throughout the world.
Meanwhile, there's a killer in the spooky apartment senselessly killing off women. Not atypical of Argento, his script is short on logic but largely outweighed by man's visual splendor, with dazzling art direction on display. Comprised of hypnotically surreal imagery, tense murder set pieces aided by Keith Emerson's eerie musical score, and a lot of murky mythological mumbo jumbo about the "Three Mothers." One curious sequence has a crotchety bookseller on crutches being attacked by rats in a creek and while screaming for help, a hot-dog vendor comes running to the rescue but only to stab the rat victim inexplicably. Don't ask questions, it's quintessential Argento!
- 2 and a half stars out of 4.
Argento Takes Nosedive With Mother of Tears
The third foray into the supernatural occult is typically gonzo, over-the-top, but artless gobbledygook without any apologies . . . and without any maggots this time! The director's daughter, Asia Argento, plays a Roman museum curator who opens an urn and unwittingly unleashed a long-dormant evil that spawns complete madness throughout the city with inexplicable suicide and murder among hundreds. Along the way, she's aided by historians, psychics, the spirit of her dead mother, and priests, gradually discovering that she holds great poers.
It's all about as clear mud. Dario Argento tries very hard to be shocking and offensive with such brutally graphic, horribly disgusting gore moments of the first order---an infant thrown off a bridge, a priest slashed and stabbed repeatedly in the head, and a woman having a fire poker jammed up her, well, you get the picture. He tries anything and everything, but cannot muster up any invested interest from the ridiculously hard-to-follow plotting to the complete lack of character development. With one exception, admittedly, there is some tension during a chase sequence with both a group of cackling, punked-out witches and cops chasing down Argento around a train station.
Asia's performance is simply horrid, the climax is a perversely weird, sadomasochistic orgy combining cannibalism and lesbianism (not kidding), and the final shot is an anticlimactic road into obscurity with the actors left laughing. Mother of Tears is laughably awful, tasteless camp gone sour: it took Argento a belated 27 years to follow up his first two films, and this is the best he came up with?
- 1 star out of 4.
