Oct 2014:Watching the movie late at night for the 2014 October Horror Challenge on the IMDb Horror board (RIP) I found it to hardly leave me with any lasting memories, partly due to being tied,but also due to the flick being so disconnected from the other two in the series.Feb 9th 2017:Whilst trying to decide which of the last 4 titles (one alt cut,and two in need of re-watching) from auteur film maker Dario Argento,I read a review from a fellow IMDber on Argento's Dracula,who said it was not as "entertaining or gratuitous as his bonkers Mother of Tears." After reading this,I decided to pay another visit to the final mother with a new mindset.The plot:Sent an urn recently dug up that is believed to contain artefacts belonging to the mythical "Third Mother/Mother of Tears" Mater Lachrymarum, art restoration student Sarah Mandy opens the urn with a curator . Accidentally cutting herself during the opening, (woops!) Mandy's blood leads to Lachrymarum's henchmen coming to life and killing the curator. Running away,Mandy soon discovers from ghosts of the past that she is the only one who can stop the mother crying.View on the film:Whilst stripping the film of the distinctive appearance of Suspiria and Inferno,co-writer (along with Jace Anderson / Walter Fasano/ Adam Gierasch and Simona Simonetti) director Dario Argento & cinematographer Frederic Fasano unearth a dusty, golden appearance that keeps the horrors linked to the nightmare unearthed. Tearing the limbs out of anything even slightly subtle,Argento attacks the low budget for a piece of gloriously weird,pure Horror kitsch. Making the end of the world look like a Friday night out,Argento jumps over the limited extras with practical bonkers delights,from gallons of over the top gore and bad CGI ghosts,to a random cheeky monkey and the witches looking like a Goth band.Criss-crossed from various screenplays written over 30 years,the writers struggle to keep any of the original elements of the first two films intact,with bone-dry scenes involving "research" featuring characters showing illustrations in books for scenes the budget can't cover. Rolling down an Adventure Horror path,the writers push the mammoth flaws aside for hilariously odd shocks,that leaps from Mandy fighting hobos on the eve of the apocalypse,to Mandy being unable to spank a demonic monkey. Reuniting with her dad, (who lingers a bit too long at her naked body) sexy Asia Argento gives a fittingly peculiar performance as Mandy,who largely appears oddly relaxed at the end of the world,as her dad closes the urn on The Three Mothers.

Sure it's not the new "Inferno" or "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage", but we finally have glimpses of the old "Argento's style" back! A good, gory, horror movie, average scary scenes, nice FX and great story.This is the third movie about the "three mothers", "inferno" and "suspiria" are the other two, and it close the circle of the three demons story.As I said we are still a little far from the great directing we had in the first 70ish Dario's movies, but at least it's far better than the latest releases we have seen! The story goes on nicely, Asia is perfect in the leading role, Udo Kier find his "usual" bad ending in one of the best scenes of the movie (and of latest 20 years horror movies!), demons and gore scenes are really well made with the right amount of suspense.. what else do you need in a classic gore story! Sure, in this "twilight" era, when horror movie seems closer to its sunset, you'd like to see more movies like this!

I think Dario Argento's "Mother of Tears" operates under the adage that some things are better left buried. Thirteenth century artifacts are uncovered inside an urn found buried with the crypt of a man during the excavation of a church where bodies were being "relocated". The moment the urn is opened, an evil is released which will almost immediately unleash upon Rome a possible apocalypse as the Third Mother prepares for total domination of the world. "Chaos. Blood. Tears." And, does the city come unglued! A woman tosses her baby off a bridge (yeah, Dario shows the baby's head slam into stone while hurling to its doom!), violence erupts in the streets, with the carnage tearing Rome apart, a sickness that is spreading like the plague. The moment the urn's candlewax seal (the priest is responsible for the seal, attempting to keep its contents sealed until an archaeologist named Michael could examine them, his expertise in "esoteric science" appropriate for determining the purpose for the artifacts) is broken, terror awaits society, unprepared for the evil that will produce a corruptive influence on all who fall under the Third Mother's spell. It seems that Asia Argento's "student of archeology" is immune to the power of the Third Mother, but how will she be able to stop her before the madness that is enveloping the world becomes to vast to contain? Mater Lacrimarum, the third witch, is the Mother of Tears, considered the most beautiful and cruel of the three (and the other two were pretty damn evil), and as long as the "talisman" (a cloth that drapes over the gorgeous naked body of Moran Atias) is liberated from the seal, evil will reside. The screenplay (co-written, and based on a story, by Dario Argento) is busy, to say the least, with Asia's Sarah Mandy actually the daughter of a "white witch" (played by her mom, and the former lover of Dario, Daria Nicolodi), herself blessed with certain powers (like invisibility). "Mother of Tears" is all over the map; it is really demented. The violence is of the preposterously extreme variety. I mean eyes are gouged out, a face is crushed by a door, a woman is vaginally skewered by a sword, one victim is strangled (after being disemboweled) with her own intestines, and poor priest Udo Kier is bludgeoned repeatedly in the skull with a hatchet! There's a monkey that seems to guide members of Lacrimarum's henchmen—their eyes, so to speak—and children are constantly butchered (one scenes shows the hand of a Lacrimarum follower reaching into the belly of a dead child, another shows a partially devoured child corpse!). This movie is a bloody mess. But, it all makes sense because Mother of Tears is the most sadistic and vile witch of her trio so the slaughter and plague of violence derives from her desire for total anarchy, death, and destruction. My complaint concerns the CGI and "ghost" shenanigans with Nicolodi, helping her daughter escape peril and capture; it looks and feels tacky. Dario follows his daughter as she enters the ruins of the Rome manor, built by an alchemist responsible for the other two (built in New York for Inferno, and Freidburg, Germany for Suspiria), eventually descending into the hidden chamber to face her enemy. The ending is pure Corman, a bit disappointing as the collapsing structures look less impressive thanks to cheap computer graphic effects. The story includes a lesbian psychic who teaches Sarah about contacting her mother and the archaeologist/scientist, Michael (Adam James), being pursued by screeching girls with giant hair and thick eye liner (they look like they stepped right out of the 80s). Dario just hurls the kitchen sink at you. Bottom line is that this film has continued to divide the Argento faithful. While I consider it a lot of grisly, and over-the-top fun, others think Argento has forever lost his mojo. All I know is that I cringed and laughed at a lot of the graphic violence because Argento has no barometer in regards to "how far to go". Everyone is fair game in his movies.

Wow, I wonder how many of the positive reviews on IMDb are the work of a controlling witch? Because make no mistake, this isn't just a bad Argento film, this is really poor film-making, period.Devoid of a coherent plot, riddled with bad performances and lacking all of the style and élan that lifted his work so high above the competition in the 1970s, "Mother of Tears" painfully lays bare the empty cupboard of Argento's remnant talent. All that remains is decent turn from Asia Argento, an over-reliance on gore FX, some fun with Udo Keir and a cartoon of a cliché that purports to be the culmination of Argento's great trilogy. Well, OK, but it is to SUSPIRIA and INFERNO as SUPERMAN IV:THE QUEST FOR PEACE is to SUPERMAN I and II. That's "insult", folks.Just tragic.