Italian thriller director Dario Argento came through again with his latest release, Mother of Tears , the very belated sequel to his previous films, Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). I saw the film last Thursday night in Soho's Sunshine Landmark Cinema (where the surrounding neighborhood at night looks just like the kind you'd find in an Argento movie) at the 8:20 showing, just before the movie gets "bumped" to "midnight showing only" status. AND I LOVED IT!!!!
(Star Asia Argento goes through a lot for her father's film.)
This film is totally over the top. There are so many bizarre but grandly (and bloody; this is NOT a film for children) staged scenes of killings and other acts of violence that a viewer is liable to feel dizzy in a punch-drunk way afterwards. The photography and direction is first rate, and the cast, led by the director's daughter Asia Argento (Land of the Dead; Marie Antoinette), more than make up for the script's various plot holes. (At one point -read the links I put on this post for an explaination why- Asia's character discovers her parents were good witches and she inherited their powers. Trying to elude the cops, she discovers she can make herself invisible, right in front of people, just like Lamont Cranston.) And of course, it wouldn't be an Argento film without some awkwardly written translated-into-English lines ("There's more here than meets the eye", one cop says after finding the brutally murdered body of a colleague), but the dubbing is otherwise quite good. It's not for all tastes, but Mother Of Tears is entertaining and NEVER dull!
Reviews and plot summaries can be found at Movies.com , the New York Times ,Entertainment Weekly , Filmcritic.com and even Wikipedia , which goes into the background of the film's gestation. The DVD Planet website has a September 23rd release date for the film's Region One DVD. You BET I'm going to see it again!
-Ed
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