Mother of Tears

So it's the end of the first day, and I have something to confess... I love trashy B-reel horror films. Low budget, cheesy lines, bad acting, and buckets of blood. It's a guilty pleasure. Mother of Tears is apparently the third in a trilogy that I've heard of but never seen, beginning with Suspirio, and it does deliver all those elements in, well, buckets.

There's the prerequisite occult connection to the distant past, in the form of an urn dug up just outside church grounds in a small town in Italy and sent to Rome. There's the plucky heroine who narrowly escapes the gruesome murder of her co-worker by weird creatures who look suspiciously like the Plaque Gang from that old toothpaste commercial. There's chases, blood, nudity, more blood, bad dialog and suspiciously helpful coincidences, nudity, and more blood. But for some reason, it all fell a little flat for me.

I think it's that this type of thing needs a pretty solid narrative to structure the cheesy effects and bad dialog. As soon as the narrative becomes fractured enough that I start losing track of what's going on between scenes, I start to get bored. And while I don't need everything explained outright, I need weird events to at least fit into a framework of events or symbolism that doesn't take a film degree to come up with. That, and I really dislike it when parts are played by people who are very obviously Actors(tm), and there were a number of them here. Not the worst thing I've seen, but there were too many places where they were trying too hard to really get behind this one.