La Terza Madre (Mother of Tears: The Third Mother) (2007)

George Romero seems to catch a ton of shit for having "lost it" over the course of three films. Dario Argento has been fucking up around once every two years since, I dunno, 1990? And this, this is just unconscionable. For this to be in the same trilogy as Suspiria (which I really disliked upon first viewing but have since come to appreciate), or even from the same director, just puts a lurching sort of nausea in me. It looks like shit, sounds like shit, and makes not an ounce of sense. The acting is horrendous; Asia Argento, who is reliable in some parts but clearly limited, is disappointingly awful in trying to project anything except anger or passion. Sadness, quietude and revulsion are completely out of her grasp, and though she at least convinces in projecting fear, the movie itself has no such luck. It might be the stunningly amateurish staging and blocking putting a damper on her attempts, but she just doesn't work at all. To be fair, if you were compiling a list of Mother of Tears' many failures, she wouldn't be too high up. Things that are more immediately offensive than her: the groan-worthy ending, the cheap and utterly bland setting and aesthetic, and its complete inability to generate any sort of tension or suspense or atmosphere or honestly ANYTHING that would make this worth watching. Even divorced from its horror roots, this doesn't work as any sort of film. As a gory adventure, it's about as exciting as taking a long, feverish Italian nap. Honestly, the gore is just about all Argento gets right, almost as a reconciliation for the rest of his limitations. It just isn't enough to crawl through this disaster, though. It usually is for most of his movies, but his typically excellent set pieces are diminished here, and the viscera brought forth in unsurprising and uninteresting ways.

An utter disaster from start to finish, this is more depressing than anything else. There's absolutely no reason to watch this aside from woebegone fealty to Argento himself.