Are you ready for the celebration?
Everything is ready, my darling. Do not be
afraid. Soon we'll be together again.
This sandwich tastes as dry as hell. Hello and welcome
to Hello. This is the Doomed Show. I am Mater Richard Ariarium
and I'm joined by Mater Jafram.
Hello. Hello, Richard.
We both have on our little red. Little red onesies.
No, I'm wearing my tunic. Richard,
show to put some respect on my tunic.
Wearing those pajamas. They're red and they have all the arcane writings
all over it. But they have the little feet on them. Yes. By Thomas de
Quincey. Yes.
Putting that in air quotes, By Thomas
De Quincey. Old Tommy.
Tommy, get out of here. He was a collaborator on this film, did you know?
I did. Folks, we are talking about Mother
of tears from 2007. I want to thank our
faithful listener, Glenn Del Rossi. He brought
up that we had not covered the trilogy of
the Mothers on the Doomed show. And I was like,
oh, shit, we didn't do that. So here we are. And to that
I'd say, bullshit. We did The Black Cat, 1989. What are you talking about,
Glenn? I don't want to start anything but
like, hashtag, that is my Mother of Tears.
Hashtag should have been.
Folks, if you don't know Luigi Causey or Cozy,
I don't know why I want to mispronounce his name or pronounce his name.
Cozy. Right. Two. Two Z's, I think is a Cozy,
I think so. I'm really showing off my Italian
heritage here. He decided to finish the trilogy with
or without Argento, and he made Demon 6 de
Profundis, aka the Black Cat, 1989. And it is
wonderful. It is so good. I made that meme.
It's the guy with the sign with the glasses. He looks sort of like John
Lennon standing on a street and people are ignoring him as he's holding up a
sign. And on it I wrote, because of Luigi
Cottzi, the Three Mothers trilogy has four films or something like that.
It's beautiful. It's beautiful. I love him. But this movie,
you know, Dario took a little break from the success
of Suspiria and the slightly less
success of Inferno and teased working on this for
27 years.
It took a while to gestate. Yeah,
it took a while for the moldering corpse of the Italian
film industry to stop smelling. Because, you know, that's the other thing that people forget.
The Italian film industry completely collapsed.
It was still like kind of, you know,
shambling along in the 80s when they first Started talking
about this, and unfortunately, it did got. It did
not get made. And during that period, and we had to wait so,
so long. Yeah. And this started his. His finest trilogy
of Mother of Tears. And then two years later, we got Giallo.
And then two years later, we got Dracula 3D,
which, you know, I don't. I don't hate Dracula
3D. It's. It's pretty crazy. It's definitely.
I'm glad he didn't die right after making it, because then
I would have been sad. I'm glad he had a chance to make dark glasses.
I'm very happy about that. You know, I feel like if you hated
Dracula 3D, you'd kind of be doing a hate crime.
So it's fine. Just let it exist.
Oh, but Mangalo, I can't defend that movie. That movie just
drives me nuts, you know, like. But I'm not gonna. We're not gonna talk about
that. Adrien Brody at his finest.
Kees. Kees. No more.
I'm two characters, y' all. Anyway,
that guy. But no, we're gonna talk about Mother of Tears. And I'm gonna drop
a beautiful trailer in here right now. Hey there,
folks. It's editor Richard cutting in. I'm not playing this trailer.
This sounds hideous. Here's a small sample of what you're missing.
Okay, I know that trailer with its abysmal
audio made you excited about this movie, but, yeah,
we're gonna spoil this thing. If you haven't seen this yet, then you don't
have the Dimension Extreme dvd.
I want to say there's a German Blu Ray. Somebody released
it on Blu Ray because I'm watching 1080ps.
What cracks me up is if it's the German Blu Ray I'm thinking
of Ozzy Argento does not look like herself in the art at all.
The artist just went nuts. Like, he kind of drew her without looking at her.
And it's very funny. I don't know who that actress in the center of the
German artwork is supposed to be, but it's a lovely picture. I just don't know
who that is. But, yes, this was directed
and written by Dario Argento, but he had some help.
He did. I'm really interested in these people. Jace Anderson
and Adam Girosh. Yeah, the guy Rash.
Guy Rash. They worked with Toby Hooper on Crocodile and
Toolbox Murders. And. And they worked on
Mortuary, which is brutal.
They also wrote and directed the Night of the Demons remake, the one
with. Wow. Corey Feldman. Holy. I've only seen that once.
I barely Remember it? Yeah. Well, I mean, it makes so much vibe sense.
Like, this is Toolbox Murders. Ville Adam
also played the character dad in the Hollow,
which I know you've seen. I love
that movie. Yeah, I don't know who he is in that movie. I'll have to
look for him because he's not. He's not the dad. Yeah, he's not.
No. I guess he's another dad.
I actually started watching before we started
recording another film that they wrote,
which is called spiders from 2000.
And I only got 45 minutes in it, but it's
great. I love it. It's got some great. It's. It's kind of
like a. A spider centric X Files episode with
some great practical effects and some really bad 2000
CG effects. I'm gonna go off of 45
minutes, but highly recommended. Okay,
duly noted. Duly noted.
Yeah. And, you know, if you've got the. The aforementioned Thomas
de Quincey, you know, he's there. He's the source material.
Bless his heart. Bless his heart. So, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna go through
a very abbreviated version of the plot here because,
you know, old school, old school doomed show.
This would have been like a two hour epic episode with us
going through all of the ridiculous shit that happens in this movie. But we're
gonna. Yeah, we're skip around a little bit. This is a Medusa. Oh, I didn't
read the. I didn't read the back of the dvd. I'm sorry. Let me know
what this movie's about. Sorry. All right,
folks, I assure you, even though this is an audio podcast,
I have the Dimension Extreme DVD here
I used to have. What was it? I had something hidden in here
for years. Oh, I had my DVD of. Of Dracula 3D hidden in
here. So it's a surprise. You didn't want to have to see it on the
shelf. It's just for shelf space. It was not a statement.
EvilDread.com says this is a damn good movie.
Shocking gore and artistic brilliance mark the return of Dario Argento,
one of the best horror directors ever, says Slasherpool.com
as he concludes his classic Three Mothers trilogy,
including Suspiria and Inferno. Argento's daughter Ozzy Argento stars as
Sarah, a young American art student who naively opens an ancient
chest, releasing unimaginable evil into Rome. As violence and
murder reach epidemic heights, or 12 to 20 people,
Sarah must use her untapped magic powers to destroy
the last great witch in human history. Splattered with Scenes
of death and debauchery. Mother of Tears is a quote unquote rousingly
insane movie. Going experience from Bloody Disgusting.com
destined to satisfy Argento fans and
newcomers alike. Imagine this
is the first movie you've ever seen. Wow.
You would have very conflicted feelings about ever watching a movie again.
Yeah. So yes, we're going to talk about this plot. The movie kicks off with
the Medusa motion pictures. Lovely logo. I love
that logo. Immediately I got the Stendahl syndrome from the opening credits.
We get lots of art from antiquity
of witches and demons be eaten people and whatnot.
And our introduction to the sincerely. Pretty cool Claudio
Simonetti score. Thank you. Which has a pretty different
vibe than his previous Argento
collaborations. Glad you said that. I listened to the score
separate from the movie and was really shocked
because the only thing I remembered about the music from the
movie was the bombastic stuff. But then the techno beats
that would drop in which, you know,
2007 techno made by,
you know, a very. An old Italian guy.
Yeah. Yes. I feel, hey, I'm old now.
So, you know, that's what I would do. I'd make some terrible frickin music that
sounds out of touch with everything. I feel at home immediately
because the dubbing on the extras is perfect.
I've got a crew of workmen digging up some
stuff around an old church and they uncover the
magic. The magical tomb of Oscar the Grouch.
Forgot what his name was. And they find this tomb.
And the first sign of things not being so great
with this movie. A photographer zooms in with his camera
to take a picture and ra. Inside his lens is a demon going,
rah. And I went, oh,
but yeah, this corpse of this guy,
Oscar the Grouch, his tomb is there, but he has this
urn that's sealed in wax and it gets sent over to the museum. What happens?
Who. Who is looking at this freaking. This pile
of bones here? I mean, there's this pile of wax. Well, it's Ajah
and her pal who also works at this museum. I don't. I didn't get the
pal's name. She's not long for this world. Giselle. Ah,
Giselle. They are recklessly opening up
and spilling blood all over this mater box.
And this is very poor research and preservation.
They are destroying this document.
The wax seal done. They pull the
statues out with their bare hands and are like, oh, kind of spooky, huh?
So well preserved. Well, now when you're through with them,
they also just immediately start reading an incantation
that is packed into that mother box.
And I do need to know. And that's always a bad idea, of course.
Right. You don't want to do that. Have they not. Have they not seen evil
dread? Evil dread.
The three statues look like ghoulie totems, which is
really funny to me. Oh, my God,
they're so cute. But anyway, basically, these. These women.
These are women in stem not doing a great job with
it. Yeah, the. I work in a library and
I work in, you know, special collections, and, you know, we have a lot of
very rare and fragile items. And I have been reprimanded
for bleeding all over everything so many times. Just all these permanent
cuts on my fingers, flinging blood all over everything. I feel bad. And these.
These people let a monkey into the lab. What the hell? That's right.
Oh, my God. Let's. Well, you know what? I forgot to talk about some of
the main characters before we got started, so real quick. Well, Ozzy Argento,
you know, she looks like she's being photographed after a DUI arrest or
something. Through the whole movie. Somebody pointed out that she just seems
so out of it in this movie. She seems befuddled. Yeah,
yeah, she's. She's a little confused, I think. But her pal
is Giselle. Like you said, she's not long for this world,
spectacularly so. That's Coralina cataldi Tasoni from
Demons 2 and from Opera. She's one of
the big names of Italian horror royalty in this
movie. She's absolutely wonderful. But,
yes, as soon as she's left alone,
as Ozia goes to do some business,
she immediately gets beset upon by those demons or some demons.
And maybe our titular Mother of tears is there,
too. It's kind of hard to tell what's going on, but, my God, she dies
so horribly. Which is a running theme
throughout this film. Yes, yes. If.
If you like gore and if you're only into this movie for the
gore, you won't be disappointed. Well, I mean, yeah,
that's. That's fair. I can see people enjoying it for that reason.
However, back in the 70s and even in the
80s, Dario Gento is very gory. But it
looked good. And in the 2000s,
it looks a little different. It doesn't look very nice.
It's. It's a trend. I want to say that gore,
especially the extreme horror of, like, the French extreme of
this time period, they. It had a look to it. And I think you're
absolutely right that there was some kind of a. I don't Know,
like, the color of the blood is obviously very,
very dark, very black looking.
It's also, it's also a lot cruder and
it, it is. I mean, you know, there's,
there's, there's an extremity that we can find in the earlier Argento films that
is just sort of, I think, amplified here in a less
classy way, we might say. And it's also very digital.
And it just looks,
it's not my. I wasn't getting, I wasn't getting digital really,
but okay. I'm also watching the dvd. I'm still watching the old.
So I don't know if you got. To get it in 1080pmy.
Yeah, I'm hold out for the 4K. But no us. Sergio Stivaletti.
The man is on this. So, you know,
he's gonna, he's gonna bring back some of the old hits. We'll talk about those
later. But yeah, so her friend gets killed and then the cops come.
These cops are so boring.
Oh, my goodness. Christian Solomino
plays detective Enzo Marchi. He's, he's the
one who's, you know, questioning her and his goofy
cohort. Like, they almost seem like they're listening to her story and
almost taking their. Her description of these hunched
over weird creatures that were attacking her co worker.
But then she mentions the monkey,
and boy, howdy, do we have a surprise monkey.
This is the best actor in the movie. He's giving
so much. He's so scary, folks,
I do not ever want to be in the presence of a monkey,
ever. I just don't. I just can't. They're so scary.
And this little guy, as cute as he is, he sort
of has the same coloration as my cat Cheese, which Jeffrey has seen
on video tonight. I showed Cheese to Jeffrey for, you know,
inspection, and he said, whoa, that looks just like that monkey.
Okay, Jeffrey didn't say that,
but yeah, this monkey's little. He's a little minion of evil.
I love him so much. Yeah, as soon as she mentions the monkey, the cops
are like, what? And then we get to see our
very glam, very, very, very sexy mother
of tears, Mater Lacrimarum.
This is moron Attias.
And yeah, she's pretty great as an evil,
almost characterless person. Almost characterless?
Yeah, I mean, she's evil. She is certainly that
and charismatic. She has a lot of followers. People love
her. Yeah, she'd be blown up, man. She's great. But yeah, she's,
she's definitely has rather perfect makeup. But she was
always described as the most beautiful of the three sisters of
the three mothers. But, yeah, she's gonna. She's gonna wreck some shit.
Her presence, her power is from this tunic,
the aforementioned tunic with some archaic writing on it that
was inside this box. And once she has this tunic,
oh, we're in trouble. Tell me about what happens to
Rome when. When she does this.
So isn't there, like. Isn't there a great, like,
Italian crime film with a.
Oh, yeah. So I'm thinking of, like, Rome arm to the teeth.
Sure, sure. So here it's Rome pulling out
its own teeth.
Everything is going wild. A woman tosses a baby
off of a bridge. The skull cracks on the way down.
We have mere anarchy erupting citywide, which is mostly
dramatized for us by people smashing up automobiles,
windows, specifically with baseball bats. And it
kind of just, like, ends there. We don't get much more anarchy. And it's usually
just like, one or two individuals in, like, medium close
up doing this mayhem. But really, we should believe all
of Rome is gone haywire. Yes. This. This is
one of those times where I feel like small scale for
the budget of the film would have been better. You like news
reports of things going crazy, you know, like. But no, no.
Gento wanted to go whole hog, and he got his freaking
madness affecting all five residents of Rome.
It's just so funny. Yeah, it's. It's one of the things where the movie's threads
are really showing, especially with the animated flashback
that isn't animated. So someone, I don't remember who tells
Asia's character Sarah about the.
The Gentleman Oscar, the grouch that they dug up. Apparently he was an alchemist
who discovered the Mother of Tears secret or something.
And they do this. The drawings look
sort of like the Dylan dog artist did them,
but I suspect he thought they were going to be storyboards
that actually make it into the movie as the
whole thing. It's. It's not. It's not great. But anyway, more importantly, we need to
get to your notes. And my notes had the same exact wording.
Cackling witches. Jeffrey, who's gathering
and why? What is this? Well, who's gathering? It's just assorted
goth witches from apparently outside of
Rome who have all come. I thought it was an airport, but I guess
it's just a train station. Oh, man, those. Those ro.
Those Roman train stations sure do look very anodyne,
though. And, oh, boy, I love it. They just, like,
all arrive as this big coven. And I
wrote in my Notes. Oh, my God. Girls night, even though it's not night,
they start snarling and hissing at rail travelers.
So rude. They're so rude. And my favorite line
of the film there is, ready for the celebration.
They've just. They've gotten the call and they've all congregated in Rome.
Rome hexed to the teeth.
So, of course, one of my favorite moments is, you know,
Asia is trying to travel to meet up with the guy who I completely forgot
to mention. I'll get to him in a second. She's his boss
and lover at the. At the old museum
there. But she's going to travel to meet him somewhere.
And these witches spot her,
particularly the really mean Japanese witch.
I mean, all of these ladies have so much eyeliner.
It's like goth night all the time.
But this Japanese witch, she sends her minions
after Sarah, but she's also going to do some legwork
herself. She's like, evil enough to go and go after her. 2.
And she gets dorky,
as in a door on this train gets
slammed into her head until her eye pops out because Sarah just
attacks her. Now, we know the audience knows that this is a
mean, evil witch. And Sarah's mother, who we'll talk about
in a little bit, has been helping her with little pieces of advice on how
to escape. But Lietta was like, wait, she murdered that.
That witch? She didn't really know if that
lady was gonna harm her, right? And I'm like, ah,
hey, you know, we know she's bad. What can you do?
Hey, come on, break a few eggs with Omelette Town.
Omelette Town, That's Rome.
So, yes, Adam James plays Michael Pierce,
and that is her. Her boss, lover. I just want to mention this
guy because he is actually a very successful
actor. He's done a lot. 119 credits. Seems to have lots
of TV stuff going on. Video game
voices, all kinds of shit. We'll come back to him later. I just
want to make sure we mentioned him. But yeah. Her mother is played by Asia's
real mother in her last film performance. This is Daria
Nicolode. This is her last one. Yeah, man.
She's gonna pop up in the movie several times as the.
As a ghostly CGI lady. And she's
gonna have the funniest moment in the whole movie that made me burst out laughing
so bad. I love it. I love it. We'll get to that when
we get to that. This game is rated T for T. Thanks, Triple H.
I appreciate. I didn't start out a 10 time world champion.
I started at the bottom and worked my way up. It's time to
unleash the animals now. Only one thing can control me,
and that's you. Are you ready for some hot diva action?
So don't just watch it, live it.
WWE SmackDown vs RAW 2007. Don't just
watch it, live it. Sarah gets to her destination.
She gets to see Udo here. Speaking of people from,
you know, the hallowed halls of European cinema,
he plays. Father Johannes and from this very trilogy.
Yeah, I wish he would have reprised his character.
Why did he have to play. But I love
this. He's about to give her a book, a very important book
to help her. But his, like, live in
nurse slash friend of the family. I don't know
what murders him after she's chopped up her
own baby, which just made my jaw drop. The.
The baby, the hilarious doll baby thrown off the bridge is
one thing, but to actually see this lady's freaking dismembered
child is like, really like, whoa. But she.
In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, she attacks Father Johannes on the
stairs. And we get these beautiful gothic,
wonderful old, old, old Italian locations.
Those wonderful old Italian locations. That's one of the things about this movie that
doesn't skimp on is like, they film in some cool spots.
I like that. Yeah, beautiful. That felt like old school stuff
right there. Yeah. I mean, it is honestly so old school to have, like,
actual locations you film in these days. Whoa.
Those still exist. I've heard rumors torn
down and now they're car washes and cell
phone stores. But her pal
Sarah gets an unexpected helper. This is Valeria
Cavalli. She plays Marta, the good witch. Good Witch
of the North. If this lady looks familiar to you, it's because she was in
A Blade in the Dark. And was she in any other. She was
not in Flying Sex, which is an old. An old joke from
the old doom show days there. Ooh.
She was in. What is the American title
of this one? God, I can't wait to edit this. Lucio Fulci's
warriors of the year 2072, aka the New Gladiators.
Hell yeah. Classic cinema there.
But she is trying to help Sarah,
and she and her lover need. Need a moment.
She has a very jealous lover who's like, oh, why are you bringing a
woman home? Let's have gratuitous lesbian sex real quick and
serves no purpose. I think around this time we get a
totally pointless shower scene from Asia as well. I forget
there it's Very mixed up in my brain. But the most irritating
thing is that damn demon jump scare.
So, folks, I want to talk about Argento getting lazy.
Now. There's some weird stuff in this movie that don't make no sense.
And it's all wonderful. Weird. Weirder is better. What's not good is
screenplay band aids. Like,
oh, you know, Argento, this is a new era. You got to
keep the people excited, got to keep the kids from getting bored. You need jump
scares. So luckily it's not too many, but there's like three
big jump scare, AKA the worst CGI
you've ever seen stuff in this movie. One is
of course, the. The monstrous face in the camera lens
at the beginning. Another one is the Sarah goes
to her apartment and she sense she hears demons inside.
When Sarah foolishly believes that it is safe to
go back to her apartment and she hears a bunch of demonic voices inside,
she runs away and a demon stretches her door
like CGI style. Like something out of that.
What was that remake with Lily Taylor?
Oh, the. The Haunting. It was. Yes, it was like
the haunting remake with the cgi. It was very stupid. The doorknob
goes boom. But the worst thing
is this damn demon jump scare. I would have paid more
money not to see that. I paid money
for my Dimension Extreme dvd.
All I needed to do was have Mother Lacrimarum
standing in the room with her looking spooky with a knife
like a sacrificial dagger. And that wakes her up. But no,
we get a demon that goes,
hate it. So of course some
horrible stuff happens. Jeffrey, who's the big mouth screaming man?
I don't know. He's just a bald man.
He is like a secondary familiar of
Macho Locker Maram, friend of Monkey. There's a great
monkey's assistant. Monkey's assistant. He's.
He's like got real Uncle Fester energy. And he
at one point is on the phone with Asha and he goes,
this is not an exaggeration. He goes.
And his mouth goes so big. It's they CGI
his mouth to make like a perfect circle. It's so funny.
This is truly a moment of. This is a movie of
individual moments. Yeah, like something like that.
I love it. Yes. Now, I don't particularly care for like
the murder scene that follows it. That is really gross.
Sucks. Yeah. But I love that moment and I
wish the movie had more of those. Yeah. We have this thing where.
So he kills. He mortally wounds the
lover of Martha and then he gouges her
eyes out. And then he Frickin horrifically commits
vigilance on Martin. It's terrible.
And it's one of those things where it's like, why was like,
I get that, you know, the mother of tears would hate this good witch,
but I don't know, felt like a punishing
the lesbians moment. Yeah. Which I don't think was Argento's intention.
I think he was a. Yeah. And it was like. Needed someone to
be like. No, no, no. I just really, I really wonder about Argento's
collaborators. You know, around this time, like, I mean,
I've even come around to like the card player. I'm like,
wow, the card player wasn't that bad. I mean,
it has the. My favorite line from any Argento movie
ever. The. This is the Mecca of online gambling.
But it's just so, so cheesy. And do
you like Hitchcock is fun. It's also weird as shit. Very strange.
There's definitely some strangeness in this period for sure.
Particularly those two films. I guess I just feel like personally after,
like the Phantom of the Opera, they just get really mean spirited.
Like in a way that like, you know, he's always had that bubbling
under the surface, but it's like so much more pronounced in like a,
a sleazy way in these later films.
Again, it got more of a gimmicky thing. Like maybe people, he thought
people wanted that. Because of course, folks who don't know Argento often
will be the hands that kills victims in
the, the close ups. Like the, the black gloved killer will often be
him. And it's like that's, that's a, that's a flex on your movie studio.
Like I'm on your, your film production to do that. It's like, oh,
that's weird. That's a great way to put it. Just the mean spiritedness. It's a
little too much. Yeah. For me. Too much. Yeah. Yes.
Well, luckily everybody gets pretty fucked up in this movie.
Finally we get back to Michael. Sarah sees him on
the street and he looks unwell and they go back to his place
and he is so unwell that
his throat has sprung a leak. I do love that.
That's pretty cool. He's like, he's like, he keeps on tipping backwards.
He's like, oh, wait, hold on, let me, let me ground myself. Because I'm not
a big fan of this, this guy's performance until he turns evil.
And I think that, that he's so much better when he's been taken over because
of course I forgot to mention his Son gets kidnapped by
these witches and ends up being
part of their ritualistic slaughter of the innocents.
Like, they're just ripping this kid's guts out. Like,
what? Love it. This movie really hates children.
I like that. So she. She sets him
on fire because, you know, he's evil and he's
just totally gonna chase her around the house while he's on fire, because supernatural
stuff. And here's the funniest fucking moment of the movie.
Oh, my God, I love this part.
Daria Nicolode, you know, her spirit shows
up in CGI form and she wrestles with
this guy on fire. And of course, the CGI flames, they don't look
bad, but they look incredibly fake.
So maybe that's the same thing. But when she wrestles with him,
it looks like a woman who's very frail trying
not to get hurt by, like, dancing with her partner.
It was very funny. I loved it. Loved it.
Finally, we get to another Italian horror.
Just European, good stuff. Actor in the form of
Felipe Leroy. Aside from his
other works as an actor, he got to play a guy named Guglielmo
in this movie. Felipe Laroy. He was like one
of those, like, not really recognized as a king of giallo,
but boy, oh, boy, did he do a lot of giallo movies. He's great.
But yes, he plays Guglielmo, the alchemist
who's neither good nor evil, who's going to just
watch Rome burn. He's cool.
He's like, whatever, dude, I don't know. But I love
his metrosexual partner who's, like, really, really rude to Sarah,
doesn't want to let her in. Love him. He's very handsome.
But then the craziest shit in the movie happens.
We find out that he's able to count good old Sarah's
midi chlorians. Do you need to point out this
is Star wars reference? Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's my Star wars joke we
just got. I'm, of course, as always, I'm watching the film while
we're talking. One minute and ten. No, should be one hour and ten minutes in,
we get our shower scene, and we only see one of
Aja's midi chlorians.
But he does this thing where he. He drugs her and then
uses his big green glass to look
in her eyeball while she's, like, kind of catatonic on the chair.
And hilariously, you see this little, like, weird blue,
gnarly looking, like, what do you call them?
Like, almost like worms in her eyes or something. It's very Weird.
But he's able to see what she's seen and, like, read certain
things from her goofy eye. Gloopy shit. I don't know
what any of it is, but I'm glad it's here. So glad.
He sets her on her way to go and defeat the witch. That he
tells her, hilariously, there's no army of good witches coming.
Oh, no.
I loved it. I loved it so much. But she's gonna go
and take on the. The Mater Lacrimarum herself.
And as she's following these witches around, going down into
the catacombs underneath the city, magically, the cop is
there. The. The. The cop. And Mr. Enzo. He's just there.
Hey, he's a good cop. Would have loved to have a scene
with him discovering all of this magical was real.
Or Lietta also wanted to see a scene of him and Sarah,
like, having some kind of meeting of the minds. Instead, he's just on her side
all of a sudden. Yeah. I would like that scene as well, where he just.
He puts it all together. Because at the very end, before you do a hard
cut, he could go, mamma mia.
That's beautiful. So tell
me about what happens when we finally get to the
Mother of Tears, her party. Tell me about it. Well, it's pretty gross to start
with. We. Oh, my. We have Argento going.
Hey, hey. Gel lighting? You expect me to do some gel
lighting? All right, here we go. Welcome to the Perversity Cave.
There's a lot of perverse things happening here. A lot of moist flesh,
smooching, sucking and suckling.
But my favorite is one person is eating a tapeworm
from another person's butt.
Unreal. Un. There's things you see that
you can't unsee. And that is one of those things. Yeah, it's.
It's pretty wild. No, it's. It's one of those things. Like, I'm immediately
reminded of how people hate the
2018 Suspiria. And it's fine. Whatever. People hate
that. Of course they do. Of course they do. I was. I was.
You're being funny. You got me.
But no, they really hate the big red drenched
final act. The. The big climactic craziness stuff.
And I'm like, this is all fine.
I don't. What do you want now? They don't like a little bit of blood.
There's just stuff you can't do. I would have
been happy with that demon here. That demon that showed up in her
dream. Just stick that in this sequence. Was he even there? Too. I don't
even know. There's so much crazy stuff happening. But of course, Sarah,
she's supposed to be using her powers and her
latent witch powers, but she just grabs
a spear and rips freaking the mater.
Lackermarim's cool. I keep want to say onesie,
but it is a tunic. She rips it off and throws it in the fire
and that destroys everything. All the hell breaks loose.
Another thing I didn't care for was Sarah doesn't even try to save
the cop. He's been captured. He's being tortured. As soon as the ceiling starts
caving in, she's like, peace. And she's gone. And as she's
running away, he's following her like he just got away somehow. And I was like,
oh, no, let's. You know,
Sarah's been kind of coasting along this whole movie. I really
would have loved her to at least rescued him and been like, come on.
But no, have a friend. And as we race
to the ending, we get a hilariously so
Argento. He's quoted himself before in movies.
You know, people don't like Trauma because they say,
oh, it. It's too much of a. Greatest hits of his older movies,
but not as good. And I go, that's a little too weird to be.
Yeah, just a quote. Trauma's great. But he
literally quotes the corpse pit sequence from
Phenomena, one of my favorite films of all time.
And it's grotesque and disgusting and nasty
and I don't know why we're doing it. You would have thought that
this nasty corpse pit would have been some
back way into the witch's lair,
that Sarah would have had to get all nasty to go through to get to
it. But the moment I start trying to fix this movie's problems,
I'm having a problem. Not worth it, because I want to
get fired from trying to help him write a better movie too.
And then we get the ending with her and the cop. They get out after
all the witchy people have been killed. The monkey was crushed
by a ceiling tile or something. And Mother of Tears
herself got a big old spike from the. From the thing. And I would
say it's fairly satisfying way to.
To go out. And our cop and Sarah are
sitting in the ruins of Rome, laughing hysterically. They say,
mamma mia. I wish
I was Italian so people would believe me when I said it, but just
a boring old German. Okay, I give your permission to appropriate my
culture. Mater. Mater mia. Oh, that was great.
Okay, so that is the end of the film. Some of
the cast and crew here. One of the other characters was played by Barbara Martino.
She played Valeria. I'm not sure who Valeria is.
Couldn't tell you. Maybe she was the one. Maybe she's the one who cut up
Udo Kier's character. I'm not sure. But she was the lady with the
buck teeth from. From Sleepless. I don't know if
you remember that character. No. Hilarious. Hilarious.
Speaking of mean spirited death scenes. Oh, my God, that's one I've only seen
once for that reason. Oh, dude. But that movie's wonderful.
I would love to hear your thoughts if you watched it again.
That's another. That's another real set movie, which I appreciate.
Yeah, yeah. This was shot by Frederick Fasano
as a cinematographer. He also shot Giallo
and he shot. Do you like Hitchcock? I think yes,
he shot that as well. Movie. It looks as good as
it can for the price. As we
mentioned before, Claudio Simonetti, bring in the great music and the producer.
You know, that's. That's one of the things. Claudio Argento, his brother has
been there from the beginning. He's always got his. His bro producing
shit. Love it. As far as trivia goes,
I don't have a lot, but I do love the story behind
this movie getting written because
it's so convoluted. Holy shit. As early as 1984,
Daria Nicolode and Argento were teasing
that they had a script for the Third Mother. They've been
sitting on that, this thing for years. But of course,
Daria and Dario split up very famously.
No love lost there. Things got very ugly.
And so of course they were never going to use that script. At least Argento
was probably going to never use that script. And then in 2003,
2004, he started talking about it again and he
was. I wonder
what the impetus was. Was it just money? Was he
on a. Was he on a roll at the time? Because I
think it was. I can get money for this movie. Yeah,
because, you know, the card player didn't do so
well. I mean, I should have done more research, but oh, man,
this movie sapped my research drive right out of
me there. But then he got in touch with Anderson and Garash, our pair of
writers who worked on what we talked about earlier, Mortuary and
the Toolbox Murders remake, which I actually really like that movie. Speaking of mean spirited,
although the original. Was very mean spirited in a different way.
In a very different way. But yeah, they worked with him and they did
a lot of you know, like, hold up in hotels and would work on it
with him. And then there was rumors that he had fired them because he hated
what they brought to it and that he was going to redo the whole
thing. But then that never happened. So there's. All three of them are listed
as screenwriters. Very convoluted. I would love to be a
fellow guest in those hotel rooms while they were writing this thing.
God, I can't even imagine. In the next room with a glass.
Your ear up to a glass against the wall. Oh, my God.
Just see it. It's so funny. I just. The production was
delayed a lot there. I don't. I didn't hear any, like, crazy stories about
anything. It's just. They had trouble getting it ready for Cannes. Well, that's the.
That's the most wild thing for me is that the Cannes Film Festival requested
them to be a part to enter the competition in 2007,
and they did not. They were not able to deliver a full film.
They delivered about 20 minutes, which is hilarious.
Crazy. Imagine just watching the opening 20 minutes
of this movie. Movie and being like, whoa, whoa.
40 minute standing ovation.
Oh, my God. They did run into censorship troubles.
The Italian film censors were like, whoa, no, no,
no, no. You can't do any of this. So he had to cut three minutes
out of it for the theatrical release, which has all been restored,
apparently for the. The unrated version of the movie,
the. Extreme version, the dimension extreme version,
man. The film did not do well. It did
okay. It almost made its money back, according to. According to
various websites here. It almost did. It didn't really do it.
But Argento is particularly heartbroken that it didn't do
well in his biography. He's like, you know, I put everything
into this movie, and nobody cared. It's like, oh, well,
you were surprised. Like.
I mean, not only did the audiences not really care, but critics did not either,
to this day. But Argento, I found this quote.
It was on Wikipedia, and it's just so funny. He was dismissive of the
critical reaction, saying, quote, the critics
don't understand very well. But critics are not important.
Absolutely not important. Because now audiences don't
believe anymore in critics. Many years ago, critics wrote
long articles about films. Now, in seven lines,
they are finished. The story is this. The actor is this.
The color is good.
I mean, wow. I feel seen. I feel seen.
He's hurting me, James. I want to hear his takedown of the one line
letterboxd review next. Oh, my God. Yeah,
you'd Have a real problem with the meh or the
oof. The color is bad.
The color is mid.
Oh my God. So,
Jeffrey, how do you feel about Mother of Tears?
I don't feel much.
This is not a movie for me. I think.
Yeah. When you gave me the. The option of choosing
my. My mother's film to watch,
I was like, well, it's got to be this one because I've already seen it.
It's called the Black Cat, 1989.
And I wish we had watched that instead. We could have just talked about it
all over again. Yeah, yeah, later. Argento is a real hard sell
for me. He's just like operating on a different. On a level that
I'm not comfortable with. And this is a definite entry
in that saga. Sure.
But it was still fun to talk about, so what can you do?
And it had a monkey. It had a monkey and a man who went.
I still kind of love this one. Even with all my criticisms about
it. I really wish it was different in terms
of scale. I know he wanted to go big or go home, and I
think that he should have learned. He certainly didn't learn it by
the time we get to that train station in Dracula 3D,
which is one of the single worst pieces of CGI
I've ever seen. If you haven't seen the train scene in Dracula 3D,
it'll knock your frickin head off. It's so bad.
But I defend this one a little bit because what
do you expect, you know, people who are like really hated this so
much. Like it was 27 years.
Of course it was like gonna be bad.
We're so lucky it wasn't worse.
I don't blame. I mean, but I don't blame anybody for hating. I don't know.
If you don't like this, no problem. I'm not like going to the mat over
this thing. This is me wanting to love it as every time when
he gets money, gets something together, makes something.
I'm very forgiving with him. Giallo notwithstanding.
I've even enjoyed the worst things of the worst
moments of Phantom of the Opera. The worst Moments of Dracula 3D
are funny to me. I genuinely loved dark glasses.
I feel like his journey movies where characters
wander around and happenstance
goes on for a while. I love stuff like that where it's
beautifully shot and meandering with intent. I wish
that this had. Had that the old sheen of the 80s.
For Argento, like you were saying, those days are gone.
Why he never had that energy again
after a certain point like even my favorite stuff
in the 90s isn't like his. My favorite stuff of his in the 80s.
I don't want him to repeat himself. But like,
where. What happened there? Where, you know, what was it? Is just money? Was it
just shrinking scripts? Did he not want to
do horror anymore? You know, no longer able to go big or
go home. He went mid and then went to bed.
Good night. I'm a sleepy old man. As for
getting back to this movie, some subtlety would have been nice.
There's a couple moments where you see the
witches staring at people, like their
presence isn't frightening. Take the scene from Inferno
where the mother of tears is watching the main guy in
that classroom making him feel nauseous versus
the guy in this movie,
Michael. The witches are just staring at him and it's so not threatening.
And you're like, you know, just staging. This felt like lazy
staging. I mean, the mothers themselves are terrifying in Suspiria
and Inferno. And here she is full frontal
and not scary. She's meant to be an object of
titillation, which is. I don't know, it's just not really working.
Yeah, it's one of those things. I would love to just fix this,
but apparently I can't. No, they won't let
you. Yeah, but yeah, I enjoyed my re watch.
I. I definitely got a laugh out of Daria Nickelodeon wrestling that guy.
That was the funniest ever. Beautiful. Well, beautiful I'll say. At the very least,
it got me wanting to explore spiders 2000.
Hey, you know Mortuary? The one with
the. The lady from Denise Crosby?
She was on Star Trek. She was Data's lover.
Lover. Tasha Yar.
No, mortuary is fun. I would love to re watch Mortuary.
It's got a suddenly out of nowhere
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Turn to it where you're like,
wait, I thought this was about a haunted mortuary. There's a leather face.
What? The leather face is on the poster.
I know. I don't know why they fooled you.
Well, Jeffrey, thank you for going with me on this very,
very strange, confusing time.
And folks, thanks for listening. Stay tuned for
when Jeffrey and I talk about Argentos next
movie. I would love it. I would love it if you made one more.
As long as Ozzy is not in it. Just one more. I haven't seen dark
glasses yet. I loved it. I thought it was great. It's. It would have
been ruined if Ozzy had gotten into it. I'm really glad she didn't because,
yeah, somebody said that she's she's worse when her dad directs her
and I'm like, yep, can't argue with that.
But anyway, thanks for listening, folks. Have a good time.
Get your monkey on a leash. Burn my tunic, please.
And we're done,
folks. Thanks so much for listening to this episode.
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