Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007)

Hee hee hee. Here's Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "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. Dario Argento's "Mother of Tears" features one such evisceration, in the movie's first 10 minutes no less. (The unfortunate victim is strangled with her own entrails, a nutso stylistic touch that's the horror-movie equivalent of tying a bright scarf around your neck to liven up a dull outfit.) "Mother of Tears" features other assorted dashes of sick, twisted ingenuity -- a semi-medieval eyeball-stabbing device; a deep slash of a neck wound that causes the victim's head to flap around as if on a hinge -- that may make you wish you'd hung onto that "Mark of the Devil" barf bag. "Mother of Tears" is depraved, bloody and unrepentantly exploitive, and the plot makes virtually no sense.

Asia Argento (Dario's daughter) plays Sarah Mandy, a young woman whose life becomes a nightmare when a sealed stone urn shows up at the Rome museum where she works. Even though the urn is addressed to the museum curator, Michael (Adam James), who is also Sarah's boyfriend, a curious colleague can't resist opening it right away, and that's when the trouble begins. Inside are three ugly stone statues and a pagan ceremonial garment, which looks suspiciously like a cutoff sweat shirt trimmed with glitter glue. But this is one powerful piece of workout wear: It will awaken a leggy supermodel named Mater Lacrimarum (Moran Atias), aka the Third Mother, the last of three powerful witches who, for centuries, spread fear, mayhem and destruction around the world." Read the full review here.

While Stephanie might be a fan, lauding the film's vitality over the grim sadism of Hostel et al, not everyone is as appreciative, not even all of Suspiria's fans. Here are a few excerpts from the less complimentary Village Voice review: "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...The man who made The Mother of Tears...can't even hurl a baby from a bridge without the Fisher-Price doll bonking to pieces on the way down...This sepulchral pole-dancer [Mom of Tears to you and me], who snacks on tears and presides over a subterranean Plato's Retreat of ornate depravities—anybody care to explain the woman eating a length of Laffy Taffy out of someone's ass?—flexes her demonic might in the first of the movie's splattery showpieces: an attack on a museum staffer who has her teeth bashed out with a pestle before she's eviscerated by homunculi and hanged with her own guts—while a screeching monkey shrieks its encouragement. The eyewitness, Sarah Mandy, played by an unfortunately restrained Asia Argento, will later discuss this event with notable understatement: "Something strange happened to me tonight."