Mother of Tears - Grade A Schlock

This movie screened as a part of the Midnight Madness section of the TIFF. The Midnight Madness program is one of my favorite parts of the fest. The films they select usually fall into the horror, exploitation and action genres with a few off-the-wall comedies thrown in. In the past few years, the program has screened: Saw (before it blew up), The Host, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, Borat, Hostel, Ong-Bak and a ton of other movies that have gone on to be cult faves. Mother of Tears is your quintessential Italian horror movie. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of Italian horror, but I can hold a decent conversation about it. Dario Argento is one of the godfathers of the genre along with Lucio Fulci. They are contemporaries of zombie king, George Romero (whose latest zombie flick, Diary of the Dead, I’ll also be seeing).

Mother of Tears is the final movie in a trilogy about blood-thirsty Sapphic witches. I saw the first part, Suspiria, years ago. I barely remember it, but Argento’s name was enough to get me to check this flick out. Hyper-absurd death sequences, gaping logical plot-holes, incoherent dialogue, cheesy soundtracks…these are the hallmarks of Italian horror. Mother of Tears has these things in spades. First of all, the movie looks like it was made in the 1970s. It takes place in present day Rome, but only the occasional cell phone use indicates such. Asia Argento (Dario’s daughter) plays the heroine who has some latent witch-y abilities that will allow her to defeat the eponymous head witch. The head witch apparently wants to throw the world (or at least Rome) into chaos so she can have these naked lesbian-witches-with-awful-80’s-hair-parties. The plot doesn’t make much sense, but as I said, that comes with the territory. There is a lot of insane gore including an eye-gouging, intestinal strangulation, full body impalement and other wonderfully ridiculous acts of debauchery. The dialogue is often hilarious (“I’m sorry I can’t help. I’m just a psychic.”), and it contains a few decent scares as well as a monkey--an awesome little screaming monkey. I can’t say it’s a good movie per se, but it was entertaining. These types of movies don’t seem to be made in order to be good or bad; they just exist for their own sake.