The Mother of Tears.

"Treating The Mother of Tears as intentional self-parody is the only way to get much enjoyment out of what should have been a triumph," writes Jim Ridley in Voice: "the long-awaited, long-deferred climax to [Dario] Argento's Three Mothers series, begun in 1977 with Suspiria and followed in 1980 by Inferno. And indeed, taken as a stand-alone entity, The Mother of Tears is a high-camp hoot—a nut-brain fiasco so awe-inspiringly awful that somewhere in the great beyond, Ed Wood raises his maggoty fist in solidarity."

"Making fun of this sort of ripe, over-the-top horror isn't difficult: it's impaling fish in a barrel," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "What's tougher to account for in Mr Argento's work is the often extraordinary grace of his filmmaking, which shows itself in the long, tense intervals between outbursts of stomach-turning gore. He's both a sensationalist and a sensualist, and the line that separates Argento the showman from Argento the artist is razor thin."

Updated through 6/7.

"Coming after a couple of slack efforts sadly reminiscent of Hitchcock's tepid final years, The Mother of Tears feels like Dario Argento's Frenzy, a burst of late-career vigor that allows the horror auteur to address old themes and run them to delirious limits," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "[I]t's a teasing, energized gothic reverie that refers to Suspiria's glories without cheapening them and, in the debased age of Eli Roth, shows that through Argento's prowling camera the macabre can still be bloody lyrical."

"[W]hile Argento illuminates the occult as a tactile, living thing, he has never shown the slightest interest in making that terror seem like something that could exist outside of the frame," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Take away Argento's undeniable craft, and what would you really be left with? The answer is Mother of Tears."

"If Suspiria was a candy-colored fairy tale and Inferno a waking nightmare of illogic and bold visuals, then Mother of Tears is an unremarkable death metal video with hot, naked witches in faux-S&M wardrobe," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. "The worst move a director of Argento's ilk can make is to give his audience the opportunity to wonder why a woman whose innards have already spilled out on the floor is still alive enough to necessitate strangling with her own intestines. In the past, sheer spectacle was enough of a distraction to negate such logical questions; Argento no longer possesses such recourse."

"Fresh off an astounding S&M performance in Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate, and soon to be vamping in a theater near you in Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress, Asia Argento is unusually nondescript here — dull, even," notes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

Asia Argento's "odyssey has a little Harry Potter, a little Da Vinci Code, and enough splatter to make the late Lucio Fulci dash his brains against the inside of his coffin for the chance to come back and top it," writes David Edelstein in New York.

"Argento draws an orgiastic link between sex and sin that is surprisingly regressive," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

In the Philadelphia Weekly, Matt Prigge lists "Six daughters who've acted for their director fathers."

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Updates, 6/6: "The Mother of Tears is silly, awkward, vulgar, outlandish, hysterical, inventive, revolting, flamboyant, titillating, ridiculous, mischievous, uproarious, cheap, priceless, tasteless and sublime," declares Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "And that's before the evil monkeys and sniggering Japanese harpies start running amok. By the time it gets to the diabolical subterranean soft-core orgies, this lunatic B-movie extravaganza has long since defied description and dazzled every irreverent, gore-hungry synapse in the brain."

"What's key to appreciating Argento is understanding his use of violence, which to unaccustomed eyes surely has an effect of shock or disgust," writes Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You:

Shock and disgust aren't the intentions, however. Argento's films are foremost potent, colorful palettes, and violence is typically in service to both these palettes and the atmosphere of dread. My favorite example is in Tenebre, in which a woman has her forearm chopped off cleanly by the giallo killer with a meat cleaver. She grasps the wound, and carefully aims the offshoot - which is shooting out like water from a spigoted hose - at a white wall, bathing it in fluorescent red blood before she collapses out of the frame. This instance - the painting - is what makes the film great.

Mother of Tears has neither the revelations of Tenebre nor the expressionistic lighting of Suspiria or Inferno, but its gothic atmosphere is more or less the same.

"We've lost something in the culture of horror movies when a good, solid evisceration at the hands of slobbery, bloodthirsty demons has come to seem old-timey and quaint, a comforting relic of drive-in gorefests and 70s-era Times Square double features," argues Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Mother of Tears is depraved, bloody and unrepentantly exploitive, and the plot makes virtually no sense - it's the sort of movie nobody, save Argento himself, is crazy enough to make these days. It's also so full of life that it dwarfs contemporary horror pictures of the Saw and Hostel variety. Argento - who is now 67 and who made his first movie, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, in 1970 - has no interest in nihilism: Instead he goes for the gusto, with tooth and claw."

"Almost nothing in this gore-drenched sprawl makes any sense, from the ludicrously flat dialogue to the dumb things people do when ancient demonic forces stalk their mortal souls," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "But that only adds to the vertiginous fun."

"When the film premiered to mass bedlam in the Midnight Madness section of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, everyone seemed to agree that it was off-the-rails, batshit gothic camp, but couldn't agree on how to process it," recalls Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Are we laughing with Argento or at him, or does it really matter in the end? If you're a fan of Argento's, it does matter, and watching the once-great stylist continue his nearly two-decade-long decline with Mother of Tears isn't all that amusing."

"This over-the-top thriller offers extended flashes, if not a full-blown homecoming, of the artist his long-suffering devotees know and love," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "For the rest of us, this is simply tasty supernatural goulash served with a side of Fangoria pictorials."

Nick Schager: "Devoid of malevolent aesthetic splendor, and engaged in thoroughly unflattering thematic dialogue with its far-superior forbearers, The Mother of Tears is an ignominious mess, one that - for anyone who once prized Argento's work - is apt to make one misty-eyed."

Andy Klein, writing in the LA CityBeat, agrees that Mother "has its moments, but it really can't supersede my fondness for his much earlier stuff."

"To be sure the picture shows a vivid imagination at work; would that it was placed in the service of less dubious ends," writes Andrew Schenker at the House Next Door.

Update, 6/7: "Coincidentally, in many ways there's some similarity between Mother of Tears and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III (1990)," notes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "They both took decades to produce after the first two parts were completed in close proximity; they both come from directors of Italian descent; and they both feature the director's daughters in the third installment. They're both disappointments in comparison to the originals, but taken on their own terms, they both work remarkably well."

Posted by dwhudson at June 5, 2008 6:54 AM