Yay! More Dario Argento goodness! Presumably, nothing's going to top Phenomena for sheer awesomeness, but it's always fun digging through the back-catalog of groovy artsy directors. Inferno here is actually a bit of a sequel to Susperia. Specifically, these two and Mother of Tears form the Three Mothers trilogy, as is explained the instant this sucker starts up, which, like Phenomena, it did the instant the disc was in there. Ack!

This is a pretty cool intro actually. We IMMEDIATELY start off with our main character translating the Book of Plot Exposition, AKA The Three Mothers. Uh, real short version here. There's these 3 thematically linked sisters (Sighs, Darkness, and Tears) who are supernatural forces of evil, in particular being the local sources of all evil for Frieburg, New York, and Rome specifically. The author of this book build their totally awesome homes for'em, and did enough research to jam some cryptic hints to defeating them into this book. It's all really important info, and between how it's being dispensed in this big wad of narrated text, and the twinkly piano music, it's REALLY giving me a vibe like I'm playing a Survival Horror game and should be jotting these clues down. Apparently, the main character has the same idea and does so.

Now, the last two Dario Argento movies I watched have very similar structures going on. Brown haired American girl goes to european school, it's kinda creepy, eventually it's murder investigation time. Here it feels like we're just kinda skipping over an hour of the movie. Mainly because here, our source of evil goings-on is in America. Also because our main character here apparently just independently got it into her head to go and sneak around and work this stuff out.

Seriously, she just went into a used book store, picked this thing up, and decided "I'm going to go and hunt down this here den of evil and see if I can bring it down. Apparently it's only a couple blocks away and all. So she breaks into this creepy pipe-filled blue-and-red-lit basement and more or less immediately dives into a creepy flooded hole in the floor. Swimming around in a flooded mansiony room with nice carpeting and candelabras. Arguably she just dropped her car keysand is trying to get'em back, but they wouldn't have ended up in the cool flooded room if she hadn't already been thinking about checking it out.

Anyway, after a while of swimming and coming up for air a couple times, KEYS GET! And of course, as soon as you pick up the keys in this room, it triggers a scene where the door opens and a corpse floats out to freak the heck out of you. I'm so getting Resident Evil vibes left and right. So yeah, sufficiently freaked out, she pretty much makes a run for it, accidentally dropping some small item, which a mysterious gloved figure grabs.

Meanwhile, in Rome! Or more likely, 2 weeks later in Rome, we have what is apparently a music chool, where our main character has sent a letter to her brother, who looks totally like Emilio Estavez about what she's been doing. So yeah, Chris is sitting here in class reading the letter Claire sent him, and sitting a bit away from him is what's clearly Mamma Tears making eyes at him. See, the book of plot established that while Mamma Sighs (AKA the Directress) was a bit corpsey looking, Mamma Tears is totally hot. So yeah, she totally has this Stevie Nicks sorta look going, is petting Blowfeld's cat, and her hair is blowing in the non-wind. We can't go and have Chris as a major protagonist though, he's all male and stuff. So, he leaves the letter behind for the girl next to him to find and become interested in. I guess we'll be calling her Jill. So yeah, having gotten interested in the premise here, Jill heads to the local TOTALLY AWESOME LOOKING LIBRARY to check out her own copy of the Book of Plot Exposition. Always nice when more than one copy of these important type books. Anyway, she starts reading, and suddenly hears creepy whispering all over. Oh, and she's apparently being stalked by Blowfeld's cat there too.

So, poking around the library, she finds a staircase leading down into some kind of dungeon-kitchen, with big pots of porrage bubbling atop open flames. She asks the highly creepy guy in the back how to get out, is told, but then he notices that she's holding "THE BOOK!" and attacks, with his creepy demony claw-like hands. So, she drops the book, almost gets her head dunked in a pot, and manages to get the heck out. She ends up getting hit on after returning to her apartment by some guy who turns out to be a reporter. She tries bringing him in on the whole deal, but he's not big on it. She immediately calls Chris, because come on, he at least needs to buy into this. Sadly, we suddenly cut to some spooky gloved hands, such as those on creepy kitchen-dungeon dude, and whoever grabbed Claire's identifying object. Anywy, they're doing some creepy voodoo doll stuff with some paper dolls. Shortly thereafter, the power starts flickering on and off, messing with the nice relaxing opera music. Random dude goes to check the fuse box, and ends up being killed in the most shockingly subdued fashion I've ever seen. His corpse pins Jill down, making it easy for her to be bumped off. Chris shows up just in time to see her body dumped into the room in very surreal fashion. He also finds the brief note snippet of puzzle clues Jill had jotted down. Oh, and Mamma Tears has an evil villain in the car moment.

Claire calls Chris shortly thereafter to confirm that he's up to speed. He never actually got the chance to read the letter, and isn't getting this phonecall either, because evil voodoo is cutting the line. Yeah, the forces of darkness are so not @#$%ing around here, and are already sending a creepy goon after Claire. So, neat chase scene of her running through a cool dillapidated building. Things are not going well. Oh wow. Things are REALLY not going well. GUILLOTINE'D!

So uh. I suppose the main character is now Chris. He goes back home to see what his dead sister is so freaked out about, and meets... did they just say this guy is named Professor Almond? Weird old mute guy in a wheelchair with a ditzy nurse, and finds her apparentment in ruins. He pokes around for clues, and suddenly we cut to someone feeding raw meat to a shadowy chihuahua of evil and then someone arranging a store window. That was unexpected. Back with Chris, he meets Rebecca, another person dwelling in New York's Apartment Complex of Evil. She explains some of the weird cool features of the building. Echoing Pipes added to journal.

Ah, OK, now we're getting some payoff to the weird cutaways. The guy who sold Claire her copy of the book is getting bumped off next. It's quite possible that Rebecca is too from the creepy vibe her butler is giving off. I repeat, the forces of evil are NOT @%#$ING AROUND here. I was going to say you'd figure the baddies would be more on top of any locations in which the book with their weaknesses in their immediate vicinities, but apparently they are. Rebecca slips off to finally stick Chris with some much needed exposition. Unfortunately, she does this standing next to those voice carrying pipes. Maniacal laughter confirms that Bad Dudes overheard the whole thing. Along with anyone else living in this building I suppose, but it's been established to have very few tenants.

Chris decides to poke around, following a trail of blood they just noticed. and ends up finding a Weird Cool Thing on the basement wall. It's bad for his health though, and he collapses. Rebecca finds evidence of muuuuuuurder, freaks out, and follows. She arrives just in time to see a Creep in Black hauling Chris away... and is herself locked into the stairwell. This is a grim freakin' movie here. I mean, yeah, horror movies are technically allowed to bump off characters left and right, but when you're doing this whole mystery investigation sorta deal, it's disconcerting to keep bumping off major protagonists. It's like an episode of Scooby Doo where 10 minutes in Fred Velma and Daphne are getting packed off to the morgue... and suddenly those newer ones where it's just Shaggy and Scooby are giving me a real dark vibe.

Anyway, Rebecca ends up in the attic, and is mobbed by house cats. Might have been them getting the raw meat actually, it was dark, just saw a stubby snout chowing down. It's a fairly silly scene with them attacking her for a while before a Creep in Black finally comes along to stab her. Chris comes to later on with 4 creepy people fawning over him and drugging him. He later meets up with bookstore dude, who as yet has still not been killed, but presumably will now, because this is the pattern we've established. I suppose it's really more of an antique store honestly.

Anyway, yeah, Store dude has been routinely harassed by the cats that killed Rebecca for some time now. In fact, HE HAS HAD IT WITH THIS MOTHER-@#$%ING CATS IN THIS MOTHER-@#$%ING APPARTMENT COMPLEX! So in a scene that I really do not appreciate watching because evil or otherwise, the one thing I have zero tolerance for is harming cats in any way, he goes around grabbing them all, smacking their heads on a table, and stuffing them in a big sack. He then takes his screaming sack of cats down to the sewers to drown them. Frowny-face! He gets some rather immediate poetic justice though, because when the sack goes down into the water, out comes a swarm of rats, he freaks out, falls down, and starts getting devoured alive. His oddly specific screams of "Rats are eating me alive!" however alerts the local butcher who, to the swell of dramatic heroic music, comes a-running, butcher knife in hand to save the day! By which I mean hack Store Guy's head off and dump him in the sewer. I know I'm supposed to be rooting for Store Guy, but I'm sorry, he had that coming.

Back at the apartment complex of evil, evil butler is grabbed by a mysterious hand and yanked to his doom. His creepy doom. Kinda weird old lady goes to check on him, discovers his corpse with eyes ripped out and left dangling, which is just really weird looking, freaks out, drops the candle she's holding, and in an amazing sequence of clumsyness ends up wrapped in a flaming blanket and falling through a glass floor. Meanwhile, Chris is puttering around his sister's place, and ends up fixating on the poster she has up on the wall of the school from Suspiria and pondering the one clue he caught. He eventually realizes the rather obvious, there's a trapdoor in the floor, but has to go through his inventory trying every item and combination of items to open it. Turns out it's the knife. Oh, by the way, this building? Clearly does not have fire alarms in it. Remember that burning corpse of a random other tenant? Yeah, she's uh, still burning.

Anyway, it isn't so much a secret door in the floor as a secret 2 foot ceiling floor of the building. It contains another hint scroll, unfortunately still in the original Latin, and TOTALLY AWESOME MUSIC! Full latin chorus and orchesta awesome. He goes around sneaking through crawlspaces and finding cool weird building features that are parts of later puzzles, then wanders around and finds Professor Almond, who, in his room, has a crazy home made voice-box, and reveals himself to be the profoundly ancient author of the Book of Plot Exposition. He calls Chris over for some extra exposition, then jabs him with a poison needle. Chris flips out, kicks him over, strangling him with his own amp cord a bit, and sucks the poison out. Alchemist Almond has a dying speech that's the whole standard we are powerless in the face of omnipotent evil and should really just play ball schtick.

That taken care of, Chris goes to finally confront Mamma Dark, who explains that the 3 mothers there are all different personified aspects of Death, which involves a neat but inherently silly transformation sequence into a cloaked skeleton. At around this time, Chris does the most sensible thing possible. Go "nuts to this!" and flee what is now very much a burning building. Fortunately, the house burning down is, in theory, a viable method of killing the mothers here... or at least shifting their consciousness into the remaining one. Anyway, this is the end of the movie, and it's very much a middle of a trilogy cliffhanger sort of ending. Which has to REALLY have sucked for everyone actually watching these when they came out instead of playing catchup decades later. Inferno here came out in 1980. Mother of Tears? 2007.

I am totally bumping the sucker up to the top of my queue.

Stevie Nicks is still at large.