While I’m thankful Dario Argento was able to complete his long-gestating “Three Mothers” trilogy, the witch-centric films were subject to the law of diminishing returns. They began with 1977’s expert Suspiria, continued with 1980’s decent Inferno and concluded with 2007’s disappointing Mother of Tears. According to this capper, the latter is thought to be the most cruel and chaos-reveling of the three witches, but you wouldn’t know it judging from the screen’s limp results.
In the present day, a coffin and urn from 1815 are unearthed and sent to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome. There, restoration specialist Sarah Mandy (Dario’s daughter Asia Argento, xXx) finds what’s inside: three butt-ugly statuettes and a “magic red tunic.” All hell literally breaks loose, starting with the slaughter of her co-worker but extended to the Roman citizenry at large, many of whom act like kooks, some of whom commit suicide, and one of whom throws her baby over a bridge.
Meanwhile, a coven of young, female witches arrives via commercial airlines to usher in the second age of their kind. Sarah does everything in her power to stop them — suddenly, she has acquired skills of invisibility and getting tips from her dead mother — and that includes mashing the Asian witch’s head to a pulp by slamming it in a door. Only in such oopy-goopy scenes does Papa Argento’s film seem to exhibit any spark.
Budgetary constraints ground Mother of Tears from the start. A period-piece sequence intended to fill in some witchery backstory is shown only in black-and-white illustrations; it may as well have been PowerPoint. Computerized effects embedded in the live-action scenes are unpolished enough to stick out as pixels, which goes against everything that makes Argento’s classics — and even his not-so-classics — click. His made-for-cable movies of the same era satisfy more than this half-baked work of the big screen, unable to cast any spell beyond that of boredom. —Rod Lott