June 5 2008
La Terza Madre (English title: The Mother of Tears)
La Terza Madre is the final installment in Dario Argento’s The Three Mothers trilogy of films. When an unholy urn is unearthed, all hell (literally) breaks loose: demonic creatures attack, violent mass hysteria takes over the streets of Rome, evil witches converge on the Papal capital, and the enigmatic Mother of Tears returns to power. As a film, it has quite a legacy to live up to; Suspiria is an acknowledged horror classic and Inferno is not without its fervent fans. Unfortunately, La Terza Madre is a disappointment of colossal proportions. (Warning: this way be spoilers. But let’s not think of them as “spoilers.” Think of this as me having watched the movie so you don’t have to.) Let me enumerate the film’s many failings:
1) The dialog has got to be some of the worst Dario Argento has set to film. This problem is compounded by—
2) The altogether wooden acting of the cast. In particular, Asia Argento’s turn as the daughter of a powerful white witch is, frankly, terrible. Elsewhere, Asia has proven herself a capable actress, so it’s even more difficult to excuse the poor performance she gives here. The Mother of Tears (played by Moran Atias) is equally laughable.
3) The plot has the basic outline of an interesting movie, but takes no time for character development. The principal agents just go through the motions like automatons without any clear or cogent motivation. Pile on contrivance after contrivance, and you’ve got the recipe for a movie that is continually threatening to derail itself at every turn.
4) The film can’t decide on a coherent tone. Is this a film about a mysterious supernatural threat or a slasher flick? While both aspects could be combined, the genre conventions just aren’t handled deftly enough here to make that happen.
5) The special FX are pretty iffy. Some work, some don’t. There is some impressive gore and some gore that just doesn’t work at all. The ghostly effects are uniformly poor.
6) I realize that this is a giallo standard but…hasn’t the genre outgrown the throwaway lesbian scenes that later show the lesbians being “punished” for their titilating deviancy? At this point in his career, Dario Argento should know better.
7) What was the point of the Sarah Mandy-is-the-descendant-of-a-white-witch subplot if the only power that she uses to bring the film to its resolution is…not being noticed?
8) If you tell the audience that The Mother of Tears is an almost all-powerful witch with tremendous powers, don’t make her defeat so damned easy. And definitely don’t make her defeat due to someone ripping her shirt off because that’s just ludicrous.
9) Lots of women being impaled in overly sexualized ways. We get it, Dario, you have problems with women.
10) Oh man, the song that plays over the credits is a hilarious example of what the guy from Cradle of Filth does.
Let’s just pretend this never happened, shall we?
