Oh hey, look! A Dario Argento movie with an actual honest to goodness DVD menu! Just a little over a week after Inferno, I am now sitting down to watch Mother of Tears. If I were old enough to have caught the former when it was first released, I'd have had to wait 27 years for a resolution of the cliff-hanger ending. Talk about getting sidetracked by other stuff.
We're starting off with a big montage of famous renaissance paintings during the opening credits, and then we move on to a construction crew unearthing the ark of the covenant while adding some religious type place. The cardnial in charge, whose red beanie apparently trumps hard head in headwear priority, checks it out briefly before sending it along to his friend Michael because he's more into all the crazy occult stuff than he is, giving us that wonderful "OK here's the setup" bit that Dario Argento likes to do in his movies. Cut to Michael's museum, where he's AFK, so his two lab assistants decide to go ahead and crack the thing open and rummage around. Oh, and while cutting the seal with a knife one cuts her finger and bleeds on the lid. Don't you love it when people in horror movies bend over backwards to do things they really really shouldn't like that?
Anyway, they opened the box! Inside it was... There were lots of evil artifacts in there! I guess this one's a success! we've got an athame, 3 creepy statues, and a shroud with ancient text. Well, let's spread these around and I'll translate this by first reading it aloud! Yeah, evil goes down. Immediately. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Research assistant B has spent her entire allotment of stupid points within the first 5 minutes of the movie, and is horribly horribly murdered by the crowd of evil folks she just instantly summoned. Also there's a howler monkey screeching the whole time. Not sure if it's with the evil dudes or it was already hanging around. I'm leaning towards summoned though, since when research assistant A comes back from the other room, it starts chasing her down and generally appears to be alerting the others. A mysterious voice says "GO NOW!" mid-chase and doors start getting blown open ahead of her letting her flee.
Later, while giving a statement to the police "So there were three deformed people." "Yes, and a monkey." OK, so, the forces of good in this movie are just kinda frelled from the get-go. Phenomena has already proven that in the world of Dario Argento, monkeys are awesome incarnate. Anyway, she goes off to crash at Michael's, who has a little kid apparently. We've got a bit of a slow exposition scene here, which gives me a chance to point out that thus far, we've got a distinct lack of beautiful weird unique visuals here. I think we're honestly currently in the middle of a cinematic dark age honestly. There's this very uniform look to everything made in the last ten years or so. But anyway, meanwhile evil reaching hands pass the shroud of evil along to, presumably, Mamma Tears, who puts it on... it then becoming the only article of clothing she's wearing it seems as the camera pans down. So now even Dario Argento isn't immune to boobs-by-paragraph-3? Well, there were some in the opening credits already, but those were famous painting boobs, so I was prepared not to count'em.
Anyway, the magic ritual of putting a shirt on causes Bad Stuff To Go Down. There's suddenly a montage of people freaking out and smashing cars/each other in the street, a mother dropping her baby off a bridge, stuff like that. Meanwhile, Michael goes to see Father Exposition and get some really thickly accented backstory. Uh, short version is, the ark there originally belonged to, basically, the Wanderer from Diablo 2. He just kinda dragged it around through towns that were destroyed shortly after he showed up, died all crazy and insane in a church, and they seriously holy-ed up his burial ritual. Which explains why they dug it up behind a church. Also meanwhile, Research Assistant is digging through Michael's dead wife photo collection and crying, and rioting continues.
So Michael comes home and discovers that uh, his son has been kidnapped by cultists. Is he a bad enough dude to rescue his son? Well no. He's totally on board with there being certified evil stuff going down, so he is going to go hire a frelling exorcist. While he's doing that, evil witches are strolling through an airport in a REALLY good party-time time mood, and Research Assistant is, well, researching. She gets a call from Mike, but he's being stalked by witches and can't really talk. She goes to meet him in person at the airport and "Chotto matte!" Oh hey! It's an INTERNATIONAL witch meet-up it seems. She runs away from them and hides in a book store. Mysterious voice tells her to concentrate and go invisible.
This works, causing a break in the chase scene which eventually hops onto a train where Japanese Witch randomly kills some dude before Research Assistant uh... wow. She just crushed her head to pulp with a bathroom door. OK, yeah, at this point I feel weird calling her Research Assistant. Apparently her name is actually Sarah, so let's go with that.
Now, at this point in the film, a friend of mine drops by, making it impossible for me to continue typing this up. Also, nothing else really worth mentioning proceeds to happen. The events of the previous two movies are briefly mentioned, there's an awful lot more random nudity since the witches arriving from the airport just kinda wind up having a big S&M orgy in Mamma Tears' basement, the monkey never does anything significant at all and is unceremoniously crushed by a falling rock when the load bearing boss is killed, the last 15 minutes or so of the movie feature the cop from the questioning scene up front as a main character just literally just popping up out of nowhere and expecting us to know and care who he is, and the big epic showdown is just a REALLY pathetic retread of the end of Suspiria, but instead of some last minute magic and dialog, Research Assistant just kinda wanders into Mamma Tears' Party Palace, rips off her sacred evil T-shirt with a conveniently located fire poker, tosses it into the associated fireplace, and that's it. Somehow this defeats the source of all evil forever. And again, this is after having 27 years to write this movie. Ugh. And did I mention how boring and generic the look of everything was?