Format: DVD from Harvard Diggins Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.
It’s probably not a popular thing to say on a blog that spends a lot of time talking about horror movies, but I’m not a huge fan of the style of Italian horror movies. That seems strange to say, because it often feels like style is all that Italian horror movies have. It often seems to me a number of Italian horror movies don’t start with the story or with the plot, but instead with the idea of a couple of scenes that the director wants to get to. Once those scenes are envisioned, the rest of the movie is essentially built around those scenes as best possible to make a semblance of story. This is not always done successfully. And that leads us to Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears (or La Terze Madre, if you prefer).
The sell on Mother of Tears is that it finally finishes Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy, following Suspiria and Inferno. It’s been quite the wait. Suspiria came out in 1977 and Inferno in 1980, with Mother of Tears released in 2007. A three-year gap followed by a 27-year gap suggests that if a fourth film is to be made, it will see the light of day in 21,690 (after all, the second gap is the cube of the first gap, so the next gap should be a cube of the second). Waiting just north of 19,500 years for a fourth installment might just be long enough.
