With Curse of the Stone Hand, enterprising producer Jerry Warren (The Wild World of Batwoman) whipped up something special for moviegoers: a big, steaming bowl of Chile. That is, he butchered a couple of existing Chilean films from the 1940s and ’50s to create a patchwork horror anthology barely over an hour. Because mere spit won’t bind reels of celluloid, he hired John Carradine for the wraparound footage, but was too lazy to give the veteran actor a name for his character. Why bother when “The Old Drunk” will do?

So The Old Drunk (we’ll call him TOD for short) comes across a man painting a picture of an old, sober mansion before them. TOD tells the artist he used to live there and gives him the grand tour, taking care to point out the eerie sculptures of an open-palmed hand, placed in every room by previous tenants. TOD believes intent behind the statuettes was to bring about a curse, because that’s just what well-to-do families wish to do: purposely fuck up their lives.

Robert Braun sure did. In the first story, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” stories of 1878, the insolvent man played by Carlos Cores faces eviction if he can’t scrounge up a hunk of dough, pronto, so he takes what little cash his wife has and puts all his hopes in gambling. To paraphrase a flying squirrel, that trick never works, and you can guess how dire the stakes are merely from the source material’s title.

As for the second story, it’s about … well, hell if I know. A brother and a sister is about all I can be certain of; it’s that muddled. Somehow, the tale involves marriage, Batwoman star Katherine Victor, a water well, an off-limits cellar, a series of portraits, a science-class skeleton and much confusion on my part. —Rod Lott

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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

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