A-Z Horror Movie of the Day..."Mother of Tears" (R - 2007 - Italy)Sub-Genre: Gore/ParanormalMy Score: 6.5Cast=5 Acting=8 Plot=4 Ending=9 Story=4 Scare=7 Jump=4 F/X=7 Gore=10 Creep=7An ancient urn is found in a cemetery outside Rome. Once opened, it triggers a series of violent incidents: robberies, rapes and murders. While several mysterious, evil-looking young women coming from all over the world are gathering in the city."Who wants to eat this girl?" I have not seen the first two in this trilogy ("Susperia" and "Inferno") and that took away from the story a bit as I did not know what was going on. After watching this for it's amazing gore, I will go back and watch the other two for sure!! After you get through all the visceral gore, you may see this for the haunting beauty within. It's one you can't help but talk about it after...both for the mess of a story or the great gore.

All that horror Argento has been eating over the years has come out without the use of any laxative. And it sure does STEENK!!! After watching Suspiria (The Mother Of Sighs), and Inferno (The Mother of Darkness), you'd think Argento would give us his best for last. No unfortunately it is the SH*T-END of Argento's stick(possibly after scr*wing ASIA in the A*S).There is zero suspense in the film. In the gore department, the film goes overboard. There is more profanity is this film than the other two.Plot: An ancient urn is found in a cemetery outside Rome. Once opened, it triggers a series of violent incidents: robberies, rapes and murders increase dramatically, while several mysterious, evil-looking young women coming from all over the world are gathering in the city. All these events are caused by the return of Mater Lacrimarum, the last of three powerful witches who have been spreading terror and death for centuries. Alone against an army of psychos and demons, Sarah Mandy, an art student who seems to have supernatural abilities of her own, is the only person left to prevent the Mother of Tears from destroying Rome.Final Vedict: Argent should've made a p*rno of Asia getting double Penetrated instead.

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.

***Disclaimer*** This has a lot of plot points in it, if you plan on watching the film, which I would NOT recommend, Do Not Read this Review! Honestly, upon viewing this movie, I was initially excited. The beginning scenes brought a sense of terror to the viewer and made you think, oh wow this is going to be a good movie. As you continue watching though, things just get worse and worse.Sarah, the main heroine of the movie, comes off as mildly pathetic, and amazingly enough seems to survive some pretty sad attempts at her life. My favorite is one in which a witch has her trapped in a bathroom, and sticks her head in between a SLIDING DOOR AND THE FRAME to allow her to smash her head to bits. Yeah, apparently these "witches" do nothing more than run around acting like something else that rhymes with "itches" and scream a lot. The "coven" of celebratory witches from all over the world is in a damp dirty catacomb filled with about 25 to 40 people.... oh, and somehow they have managed to capture, kill, or torture every person Sarah has managed to get into contact with.There are huge plot holes that have on real explanation, such as the Cop just showing up at the end, with no explanation of why he was there, how he found her, or who told him anything about where she was going, he was just there. For an ending of a series of movies, I thought Dario would make this a 2 hour movie, fill in some of the plot holes, and maybe, just MAYBE, make out Sarah to be a little better than she turns out to be. There is no explanation of the Mother of Tears really, how the shirt is a Talisman at all, or why destroying it would bring down the house.It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, and in the end, what you have is a series of violent deaths, a lot of flashy camera work, and a convoluted washed out story that ends up making pretty much no sense and ends so quickly you wonder why you wasted an hour and a half watching the film.