Things I Liked About This Movie:

• Director Dario Argento’s inventive camerawork; namely the shot from inside a guitar.

• The atmospheric chase through a topiary maze.

• A dead cat hanging from a noose.

• The gratuitously gay detective.

• The cool scene where a girl falls down a flight of stairs and her knife lands on top of her.

• The decapitations.

• The bathtub fuck scene.

• The almost poetic slow-motion automobile accident death scene.

Things That Irked the Living Shit Out of Me:

• The stupid faux-acid rock music.

• Just about all the acting.

• The constipated pacing.

• The way that Argento mounted the murder sequences--none of them were very suspenseful and they were all build-up and no payoff.

• The kills were all bloodless.

• The gimmick of photographing the retina of a dead person’s eye to see the last thing they saw before they died.  Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?  Too bad nothing was ever really done with it.  (Besides explaining the film’s title that is.)

Things I Did While Watching the Movie Because I Started to Get Distracted and Bored:

• Ate breakfast.

• Checked my email.

• Talked to my brother on the phone. 

• Started a load of laundry.

• Took a dump.

Things I Still Need to Do Today:

• Fold laundry.

• Take a shower.

• Sweep the kitchen.

• Grab some lunch.

• Walk the dog.

Funny how the “Things I Still Need to Do Today” section seems like it’ll be a lot more fun than the prospect of ever watching Four Flies on Grey Velvet again.

AKA:  Four Patches on Grey Velvet.  AKA:  Four Velvet Flies.

Well, Dario Argento has made us all wait around for 28 years for this final installment of his Three Mothers Trilogy, and you know what folks, it was kinda worth it.  Am I saying it’s as great a film as Suspiria?  FUCK NO!  Am I saying it’s as beautifully shot as Inferno?  BITCH PLEASE!  Am I saying it’s a gory as all get out fun time?  SHIT YEAH!

Okay imagine for a second if The Happening had kinda rocked, then what you’d get would look something like this movie. 

The plot has Dario’s daughter Asia working in a Roman museum where she opens up a trunk of relics that contain the spirit of the dreaded witch, Mother of Tears.  Once the spirit is unleashed, it causes mass hysteria in the streets and people start offing one another left and right.  Since the malevolent mama gains her strength off of other people’s suffering (she has a penchant of licking people’s tears right off of their damn faces), all is good in her satanic hood.  Luckily for Rome, Asia’s mama (played by Daria Nicolodi, her real mother) was a good witch and she pops up periodically a la Obi-Wan Kenobi to help Asia fight off the meddlesome Mother. 

In Suspiria and Inferno, Dario Argento slowly built up the suspense before unleashing upon the audience a tightly constructed and spectacularly gory death sequence.  In Mother of Tears, there’s a crazy gory death scene about every ten minutes or so.  No suspense, it just happens.  If you’re the kind of person that doesn’t mind quantity over quality, then this shouldn’t matter to you one bit because this movie is an insane gorefest from start to finish.

Speaking of finishes, the ending maybe kind of a letdown (The Mother of Tears gets killed when her negligee is thrown on the fire) but that’s okay because my man Dario sure knows how to film people getting mutilated in just about every way possible.  The carnage includes:  mouth bludgeoning, someone having their guts ripped out and then being strangled with ‘em, psychotic goth girls ripping people’s throats out, eye popping, head crushing, Udo Keir getting his face hacked to itty bitty pieces with a meat cleaver, heart ripping, pussy impaling, and some kinky S & M stuff that would even make Pinhead himself blush. 

And I’m just hitting the highlights here, people.

You see, the thing I like about Dario is that when he films a scene where a baby gets thrown off of a bridge by its mother, he likes to show a shot of the kid smacking it’s noggin on the side of the bridge on the way down before it hits the water.  Most directors would just be content to show the baby getting thrown off the bridge and be done with it, but not Dario.  He’ll show you that gratuitous insert shot of the kid’s head getting thumped on an unyielding concrete structure BEFORE it reaches its watery grave.  That’s just the kind of guy he is.  

Although not quite in the same league as its classic predecessors, Mother of Tears:  The Third Mother is still good enough for me to hope that Dario’s got a couple more Mothers like this one up his sleeve.

In this sluggish but worthwhile thriller from Dario (Inferno) Argento, Karl (A Streetcar Named Desire) Malden stars as a blind man who teams up with James (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) Franciscus to solve a murder.  It’s uneven but it has its moments (a guy getting run over by a train, a scene involving some poisoned milk and the final confrontation with the killer).  This was Argento’s second film and it’s far from his best, but his fans will definitely wanna check it out.  He did Four Flies on Grey Velvet next.  Music by Ennio Morricone.

After years of being a film critic and co-writing the screenplay for Once Upon a Time in the West, director Dario Argento completed this, his first film.  Tony Musante stars as an author with writer’s block who witnesses a violent stabbing while vacationing in Italy.  He gets embroiled in the police investigation and becomes obsessed with finding the killer.  The whispering, giggling killer makes Musante’s girlfriend (Suzy Kendall) his next target which leads up to a pretty good twist ending.  The scene where Musante unwittingly eats a cat is the “Oh no he didn’t!” highlight.  This giallo is typical of Argento’s early work with the murder sequences taking precedence and all the dialogue and plot stuff coming in a distant second.  Argento wears his influences (Hitchcock, Antonioni, etc.) on his sleeve, and while the pacing drags, it’s still clear from just his first film that Argento is the man.  Music by Ennio Morricone.  Argento did The Cat O’ Nine Tails next.