The Mother of Tears - Die Laughing

You have to be in a certain mood to enjoy a really awful movie.  Maybe you have to be a certain type of person.  There are people I know that could not sit through a Dario Argento film.  They would either throw up in their popcorn or they would get angry and storm from the room.  Either reaction would be justified in the case of his latest film, The Mother of Tears.

Argento is the Italian version of John Carpenter or George Romero - take your pick.  And, like seemingly every Italian filmmaker out there, he is not shy of excess.  So, since there is no film classification system in Italy, and since there is seemingly no border between taste and tasteless, in an Argento movie you get to see things like a baby getting thrown off a bridge, like a woman getting strangled with her own intestines, like ... I hesitate even to type this ... vaginal impalement.

Yes, tasteless.  And, just to go one step further (if that is at all possible), Argento cast his own daughter, Asia Argento, in the lead role ... and has her in a shower scene.

The plot of this film is so thin as to be nonexistent.  There are scenes where people talk, and I suppose it was supposed to mean something, but I wasn't paying attention.  The film opens with a graveyard getting transplanted, and in the process, a coffin and an urn are discovered with strange writing all over them.  They are delivered to a couple of archeologists at a library (one of them being the Asia Argento character), and when the urn is opened, some talisman and a shroud are inside.  The shroud has the same kind of strange writing on it, and when the other librarian happens to know the language it is written in and speaks the words aloud, three demons and a monkey - yes, a monkey - appear from out of nowhere and make her mouth rather a bit larger than it used to be, and then do the thing with her intestines that I mentioned earlier.

Turns out, the shroud belongs to a very powerful witch named The Mother of Tears who appears in the form of a nude Playboy playmate (or at least that's how it seemed - she never has any clothes on unless she's slipping that stupid shroud over her head).  And with her on the loose, Rome goes boinkers, and people start killing each other.  And from then on out, the movie is nothing but a series of violent set pieces just like all of Argento's movies.

Argento has always been good at using the gothic locales of Italy - the ruined cathedrals, the cobblestone streets, the massive, empty thoroughfares - to set a proper grim mood.  There is an immediate sense of atmosphere - that something otherworldly is going on, that it is beyond our control.  That Satan has been released, or witches, or Thor, or whatever.  The panic in the streets is more thoroughly realized in just a few shots here of emptiness and shadows than if he had gathered a hundred extras to parade around screaming their heads off.  To that end, Argento is a minimalist, and minimalism in horror films is always preferred.

His weakness, however, has always been in his plotting.  His films are silly.  The initial concepts sound like good old-fashioned campfire tales.  A ballet school is run by a coven of witches (Suspiria).  A writer discovers a serial killer is basing his murders on those committed in the writer's books (Tenebre).  A witch is released and causes all of Rome to go mad (The Mother of Tears).  Where Argento falls prey to his excesses is in crafting a throughline for his plots.  After about a half hour, his movies always end up being about a couple of people running around while random shit happens all around them.  In Suspiria (often cited as his best film) there is a scene where a girl ends up stuck in a room full of razor wire.  Why would there be a room full of razor wire in a ballet school? I ask you.  Oh, but it's a ballet school run by witches.  That's what they all say.

In The Mother of Tears, even after people are murdered in front of her, even after people slit their own throats and scream and wail and say all kinds of nasty things, Asia Argento's character still wants to go back to her apartment and have some tea.  Or take a shower.  I'm not saying logic should be sitting in the chair next to you when you're watching a movie like this, but at some point you have to ask yourself, "If I was in this situation, is that what I'd do?"  After the first five minutes, I would not have done anything any of the characters in this movie do.

Okay, so why did I like this film?  Because I could laugh at it.  And I laughed just about all the way through.  I laughed as much as I did during Zohan.  Oh, it's a different type of laughter.  I would even say it's defensive.  A defense against the offenses being committed on screen.  Laughter in outrage and disbelief at the atrocities achieved harmlessly through convincing special effects and being thrown up there on the screen as you've never seen them before and will never see them again.  You're not going to see any vaginal impalements in the new Will Smith movie, so if you've got an itch for something gross, vulgar, blasphemous, etc, etc, then I'm pretty sure The Mother of Tears is just the ticket.  Just bypass the concession stand on your way in.